Meet the insurtech: Atidot

When people buy life insurance from insurance agencies, and those agencies have personnel turnover, the policyholders can end up with products they don't understand and the insurers can miss out on opportunities to connect the policyholders to other products.

Christophe Testi/Creative Shot Photography

Dror Katzav, founder and CEO of Atidot, an Israeli insurtech startup, first noticed this issue in 2016 and set out to address it.

"Two or three years in, the agent is gone and then you face a situation where the customer has a product they don't understand. The insurance company never planned to provide services and the agent is gone," he said. "Finding the right opportunities, finding the right ways to upsell, cross-sell and understand the customer with data and AI creates a big value-add both to the customer as well as to the insurance company to drive lifetime value."

Atidot applies AI to analyze policyholder behavior for life insurance and annuities. Katzav served 11 years in military intelligence for Israel, building data solutions for the army, before founding the company. Atidot partners with carriers and feeds their customer data into models that identify those requiring effort to retain as policyholders and those who have potential for upselling and cross-selling.

Data is collected directly from the carriers, from distribution data Atidot gets from its own data partners, and publicly available data including demographics and economic information such as interest rates and housing prices. 

"We build a profile of the customer, who they are, why would they make a certain decision and take it from there," Katzav said. "We use basically all of the different techniques from more traditional AI to new Gen AI type stuff in order to understand the customer, understand why would they make this decision and find the best way to engage with the customer."

The company's use of AI allows its models and operations to learn as it works, as suggested by the meaning of its name, Atidot, which means "fortune teller" in Hebrew.

"We get exposed to more and more data as carriers work with us," Katzav said. "They get the benefit of the models being pre-trained, but also as they feed their data, the model gets better. It customizes for their needs, but also gives us the benefit that the next iteration of the model is better and the data is better. We improve from one iteration to another."

Atidot has been building traction in the insurtech space over the years, beginning with support from the Plug & Play Tech Center in 2017, establishment of a Palo Alto, California office in 2019 along with its Tel Aviv location, becoming a finalist in InsurTech NY's startup competition in 2020, presenting on the demo stage at ITC Vegas in 2022, and raising $20 million in capital during 2022 from several banks and venture capital firms. The company now works with Guardian Life as a client, and 20 carriers and 70 insurance distributors in all, according to Katzav.

Atidot has more growth plans, he added. Its solutions are well-suited to address current economic challenges for life insurers, Katzav said. "In the last couple of years because of the changing interest rate, loss and surrender rates have gone up across the industry," he said, noting that opening up more sales opportunities also supports insurers' performance. 

"There is a lot of need for creating these capabilities, being more supportive of the agent and building more personalized journeys for the customers," Katzav said. "The economy is a little bit harder from a fundraising perspective for the startups. But we have strong investors around the table and we've seen a lot of momentum and growth."