Zurich's global startup program crowns nine winners of Innovation Championship 2024

The nine winners of Zurich Insurance Group’s (Zurich) global startup program, the Zurich Innovation Championship, showcase a breadth of initiatives in line with the company’s ambition to leverage technology to transform its customer experience. From helping to simplify and accelerate underwriting and claims processes to engaging, retaining and supporting customers through health solutions and on their journey towards building climate resilience, the winning initiatives address local challenges with the potential for global impact for the Group.

For the fifth time, Zurich called for startups around the globe to apply to the Innovation Championship, with more than 3,300 applications submitted within the span of just four weeks. One of the largest open innovation contests for startups in the financial services industry, the program has about 40 ongoing collaborations with previous contestants.

As technology continues to advance rapidly, we must keep innovating at pace. All of this year’s winners use AI to redefine risk assessment, underwriting, claims, and customer interaction. By working together with these startups, we can rapidly leverage those new ideas and technologies to deliver a standout customer experience.

Ericson Chan, Group Chief Innovation and Digital Officer

This year’s winners across the four challenges, with an additional two wild-card winners, are:

Solutions that are tailored to customers and their evolving needs are the future of insurance. Whether it’s making the financial impact of climate risks more tangible, improving underwriting efficiency or creating personalized health programs, these innovative initiatives can truly transform the industry.

Paolo Mantero, Group Chief Strategy Officer

From accelerator to joint adoption

The Zurich Innovation Championship is based on a venture-client approach to working with startups. In the next step of the contest, the winners will enter a four-month accelerator during which they will pilot the practical viability of their initiatives and prepare a business plan together with the Zurich business units that selected them. The nine startups will benefit from both financial and non-financial support, including coaching by Zurich executives as well as internal and external subject-matter experts. Those who can successfully validate their initiatives will then work locally and globally with Zurich towards joint adoption. Successful initiatives will be announced in September 2024.

Further information

Find out more about the Zurich Innovation Championship and its 2024 winners here.

About the winners

Commercial Insurance

CLIMADA Technologies, together with Zurich Resilience Solutions, will launch a property damage and business interruption quantification tool for climate risk, providing customers globally with the financial benefits of climate adaptation measures.

Sixfold will work with Zurich North America to improve underwriting efficiency by leveraging its purpose-built AI. By understanding ZNA's unique underwriting guidelines, the platform will boost underwriter capacity and accuracy while saving time for brokers and customers.

Digital Simplification

Parloa GmbH is teaming up with Zurich Germany to enhance customer service using AI automation. The joint initiative aims to use Parloa’s AI platform to manage repetitive inquiries, freeing up resources for more complex customer concerns.

Merlynn and Zurich North America will be jointly developing digital twins of insurance knowledge workers. Learning from human expert decisions, this technology enables the automation of decisions, enhancing loss outcomes, decreasing training times, and improving consistency for claims processes.

Life & Health

NalaGenetics , a biotechnology company, will be working alongside Zurich Malaysia to create a personalized care program enhanced by genetic tests for chronic disease management. By identifying risks early, customers can be provided with personalized care plans that help them tackle chronic conditions and adapt healthier habits.

AccuHealth and Zurich Chile will together explore the mitigation of chronic disease impacts on insurance claims through a data-driven digital service, targeting B2B2E customers. The service collects biomarker data to run personalized health programs, aiming to help control chronic illnesses. Benefits include healthier individuals, reduced absenteeism for employers, and, in the long-term, potentially a reduction in premiums.

Retail P&C

LoyJoy, a Conversational AI Platform, is collaborating with Zurich Germany to enhance customer service, sales, and marketing processes via chat and social media. The platform's ability to personalize communication could help address individual customer needs, while its gamification feature could engage younger customers in understanding insurance. This collaboration is also expected to facilitate booking of consultation appointments, benefiting Zurich's sales force.

Wild cards

AlphaGeo, a geospatial data science company, is working together with Zurich Group Investment Management to optimize its Global Real Estate portfolio performance. Using AlphaGeo’s AI-powered analytics platform, the collaboration aims to enhance investment performance by identifying regions with higher growth prospects based on climate risk and social resilience, potentially leading to significant improvements in asset valuations.

MentionMe, a Customer Advocacy Intelligence Platform, has been matched with Zurich UK to leverage the value of customer advocacy as a growth driver, converting Net Promoter Score promoters into active customer referrals. This is expected to increase customer retention in line with Zurich’s customer loyalty strategy.