QBE Insurance Group Ltd.’s venture capital arm is betting once again on artificial intelligence with its third investment in the space—this time with a startup focused on developing the technology to automate office work.

QBE Ventures’ investment in New York-based machine learning company HyperScience is the third since the fund’s launch in 2017. Neither party disclosed the size of QBE’s HyperScience investment, though QBE has signed a multiyear commercial use agreement to roll out HyperScience products within QBE offices globally.

QBE Ventures debuted earlier in 2017 with plans to invest $50 million partnering with early stage companies whose technology could be used by the Australian insurer.

Before HyperScience, QBE invested in and signed a multiyear commercial use agreement in late 2017 with RiskGenius, a machine learning company focused on helping carriers, brokers and regulators analyze policy and endorsement language and also assisting with product development. Also in late 2017: QBE’s venture arm participated in a $5.9 million financing round for artificial intelligence startup Cytora, which is developing technology to help commercial insurers more accurately target, select and price risk. Along with QBE, Starr Companies’ venture arm Starr Global Holding and others participated in the Cytora financing.

HyperScience targets insurance, financial services, healthcare and government organizations with technology that can reduce their dependency on costly, slow and error-prone manual data entry operations. The company said that by automating the transformation of content readable by humans into machine-readable data with greater speed than existing technology allows, organizations can respond to customers more quickly and access more data that hasn’t always been reachable.

David McMillan, group chief operations officer of QBE Insurance Group, said in prepared remarks that HyperScience’s technology “will, in a short time, add tangible value” to the insurer’s operations.

Recently, State Auto Labs Fund—the venture arm of State Automobile Mutual Insurance Co.—announced that it had invested in Matterport, an immersive media technology company whose state-of-the-art 3-D imaging platform can be used for underwriting and claims.

Source: QBE/QBE Ventures