Hank Greenberg’s Starr Companies and Allstate contributed to a new $18 million financing round for Amenity Analytics, a startup developing cloud-based analytics designed to help businesses analyze text on a massive scale.

The New York-based startup said that both Starr and Starr CEO Greenberg led the round. But Allstate also joined in, and existing investors Intel Capital and State of Mind Ventures participated as well.

Amenity Analytics CEO Nathaniel Storch said in prepared remarks that Starr, Greenberg and Allstate’s commitments “demonstrate the power of our platform” in insurance. He also noted that “some of the most sophisticated minds on Wall Street already trust our technology to uncover insights that give their investment strategies an edge.”

Storch said the new financing will help fuel hiring as well as an expansion of where its technology can be used.

Amenity describes its platform as “using natural language processing (NLP) to help institutional investors, insurance companies, media organizations and others to rapidly process and comprehend complex text documents and uncover real-time, actionable insights.” The company said the technology can quickly spot key commentary/statements executives would need to make business decisions, drive company performance and gauge sentiment among a given audience.

Starr and Allstate issued prepared statements explaining why they invested in Amenity.

“We are excited to partner with Amenity Analytics to further develop use cases for insurance and accelerate AI innovations,” Greenberg said.

Allstate Strategic Ventures’ Managing Director Tarik Galijasevic said his firm is always looking to invest in new technology that could improve operations internally and with customers.

“We continually look for innovative capabilities that enhance our customers’ experience and improve our business operations,” Galijasevic said. “Amenity’s advanced NLP technology can help us do both by efficiently creating actionable insights from large volumes of text data.”

Source: Amenity Analytics