Zurich North America chose two InsurTech companies to represent North America in its first-ever Zurich Innovation World Championship.

Chisel, based in Toronto, is an AI-based provider of products and services for the global insurance industry. Zesty.ai is a startup focused on artificial intelligence-powered property analytics based in Oakland, Calif. Both will now move forward to compete against each other and two InsurTechs from each of the following three regions: Latin America; Asia Pacific; and Europe, Middle East & Africa.

The Swiss insurer bills the event as a global competition where the winners gain the chance to use their products for Zurich customers in selected countries. Startups with established products and services were eligible to apply by the Sept. 30, 2018 deadline.

The global competition will take place in Zurich, Switzerland at the end of January, where three global winners of the first-ever Zurich Innovation World Championship will be announced. The bronze, silver and gold winners will each receiving resources to launch a pilot program with Zurich customers. If the pilot proves successful, Zurich will help scale the service across regional or global markets.

Over 450 startups from 49 countries signed up to compete in the championship. After evaluation, 16 were invited to present their innovative technology at the North America regional round, Zurich said.

Chisel presented an innovation that can take data from statements of value, various underwriting applications and first notices of loss and automatically input the information in whatever format is needed, enabling submission prioritization and triage.

Zesty.ai presented an innovative tool to assess and evaluate a property’s wildfire and flood risk. According to zesty.ai, they use the latest advancements in computer vision, deep learning and digital imaging to capture billions of data points on properties, which can be used to enhance underwriting rules, loss ratios and reinsurance analysis.

Source: Zurich