“Before us, no one had thought of providing an integrated platform for remote insurance services and inspections”
Ravinder Kumar
Considering the current dependency of the insurance industry on manual processes and paperwork, the Ahmedabad-based company WIMWIsure stepped in with an aim to provide instant validation of information for vehicle inspections, repairs, and claims settlements through an automated inspection model.
The company, which saw its inception in 2017, is the first of its kind insurance marketplace for Do-It-Yourself (D-I-Y) vehicle inspection with API-enabled Inspection-as-a-Service to evaluate risk and losses using automation and machine learning (ML). Talking about the early days of WIMWIsure, Ravinder Kumar, Founder of WIMWIsure, said: “While I was still working with the corporate sector, I contemplated using AI in insurance and as soon as the idea of designing a tool for self-inspection and assessment of vehicles took shape, WIMWIsure was born.”
Tech behind
WIMWIsure’s in-house instrument, Insurer’s Declared Value (IDV) calculator, calculates the IDV value of any vehicle in India in real-time. The tech-stack automates the Inspection of insurable assets in real-time using photos and videos submitted by the policy buyers. The Covid pandemic marked a clear shift in the Indian motor insurance marketplace towards remote checks and Inspection as a Service (IaaS).
As one of the key services, the self-inspection model for auto-insurance is rolled out throughout India. WIMWIsure claims to be the first of its kind in the insurance sector to create a platform for pre-and self-inspected vehicles, connecting brokers, web aggregators, and channels to provide pre-inspected vehicles for instant policy issuance. The capability enhances customer experience with a lower turnaround on renewals and claims.
Further minimising the efforts, the company allows the use of official WhatsApp APIs for customer communications along with automated bots to handle queries in real-time. Ravinder said leveraging these technologies enable surveyors with a dedicated app that allows them to reduce their manual efforts and expedite the issuance of a surveyor report.
The company’s core stack is based on a microservices architecture developed using the Spring MVC framework. The inspections are done using native and web-based applications to capture photos and videos of the assets. “We use semantic segmentation techniques for deep learning of data from photos and videos at the pixel level for our computer vision solutions to automate the verification process in real-time,” said Ravinder.
Hiring at WIMWIsure
Talking about the hiring process, Ravinder said, “We are actively growing our team both in the technology and operations team. Currently, we use LinkedIn and a personal reference from our connection for required profiles. We are a close-knit core team with a flat hierarchy and look for individuals who can go the extra mile for the growth of the organisation along with their professional and personal growth.”
Growth Plan
The pandemic has hastened the transition from manual, laborious, time-consuming processes to real-time and fast methods, especially in the insurance industry, traditionally a process and paper-intensive industry. “Our operations have turned profitable in the last financial year with a huge demand for our mobile and AI services. We have recorded more than 2-lakh inspections in FY2020-21 alone. We are already witnessing rising demand for our self-inspections services as COVID continues to affect the movement of people even in 2021,” said Ravinder.
The company has raised seed funding of INR 18 million earlier this year from angels, such as Yatra Angel Network (YAN) Advisor Abhishant Pant, Paysense Co-founder Sayali Karanjkar, and Beta Plus Capital. Currently, it is targeting the automobile segment for insurance and vehicle finance segments. “Eventually, we plan to expand our technology expertise across all possible physical insurable assets and provide a marketplace for pre-inspected assets for the financial services industry. As we continue to build on our video inspection services, we are also geared to launch automated claim servicing and management tools in India and other similar Asian markets,” concluded Kumar.
