PainWorth—an insurtech startup using data science and machine learning to reduce the time and cost of resolving bodily injury claims—recently announced that they have raised $1.7M USD ($2.1M CAD) in seed funding.
Ahead of the raise, PainWorth also won Hartford’s 2021 Global Insurtech Innovation Challenge, and was one of the 2021 winners of the American Bar Association’s Startup Alley, with some even calling it “the future of claims settlement.”
PainWorth was founded in late-2019, after co-founder Mike Zouhri was struck at a red light by a speeding, drunk driver who fled the scene of the accident.
The driver was eventually caught, but as Zouhri looked for help settling his claim in the months that followed, he discovered how slow, expensive, and arduous settling a personal injury claim is—for both the victim and the insurance company.
“I found out that a claim that goes all the way to trial can take an average of 5 years to settle!” Zouhri explained, “And, even if it settles before a trial, it can still take years and there are often these 30-40% legal bills that both sides each need to pay, which—of course—drives up the price of insurance.”
Thinking that there had to be a better way, Zouhri teamed up with experts in law, insurance, data science, and machine learning and created PainWorth: a patent-pending software which automates and simplifies the personal injury settlement process for all the parties involved.
PainWorth’s groundbreaking technology quickly applies relevant legislation and reads thousands of past legal cases. It then uses that data to give users an estimate of what their particular claim is worth—along with the supporting citations, references, and documents.
Best of all, PainWorth does this without the need for expensive, manual research and without the back-and-forth litigation that overloads our already overburdened justice system.
Zouhri’s hope is that PainWorth will play a major role in reducing rising insurance costs across Canada and the USA, while also making settlements more fair, less complicated, and less stressful for accident victims like himself.
Leading the $1.7M investment round in PainWorth was 2048 Ventures—a fund known for specializing in early-stage North American technology companies with high potential. Other major investors included Panache Ventures and Mistral Venture Partners.
“We are drawn to companies that leverage data and technology to drive transparency and automation in an otherwise opaque industry,” commented Neha Khera, one of the investor partners at 2048 Ventures.
“And this is exactly what PainWorth is doing with personal injury law—an astounding $300B market across the US and Canada. We believe PainWorth has the ability to put more money in a claimant’s pocket while costing the insurance system less money, all in a fraction of the time.”
In a statement, PainWorth co-founder and CEO, Mike Zouhri, noted that this funding would allow the PainWorth team to expand, and result in a faster roll-out of their claims estimation technology to accident victims, insurers, and claims adjusters across Canada and the USA.
“As we continue to offer our personal injury claims estimation technology in a growing number of regions, there’s a lot of local legislation and case law data that first needs to be inputted into our system. Once that’s done, our software can then simplify that data and offer quick, easy answers for our end users,” Zouhri explained.
“This investment in PainWorth is going to let us transform entire libraries worth of raw data into money-saving and time-saving insights for both claimants and insurers.
“This funding is going to let us start saving consumers and insurers billions of dollars all over Canada and the United States—while also providing faster settlements to personal injury victims and reducing the amount of unnecessary litigation that is clogging up our court system.”
For more details or to arrange an interview with the PainWorth team, please contact us here.
