Chicago startup Arturo, a real estate data and analytics company spun out of American Family Insurance, raised a new round of funding to expand.
The tech company raised $8 million in a Series A round led by Crosslink Capital, an early-stage VC firm in San Francisco. IAG Firemark Ventures, the venture capital fund for IAG, Australia’s largest general insurer, also participated.
Arturo, which also has an office in Ottawa, Canada, said it will use the new financing to expand its business in North American and the Asia Pacific. In 2019, Arturo raised an undisclosed amount of funding in a seed round led by Madison-based AmFam.
The tech company, which was one of Inno's 20 Chicago startups to watch in 2020, uses artificial intelligence and deep learning to create satellite, aerial, drone and ground-level images that allow real estate professionals to accurately assess physical property characteristics.
Arturo’s tech is based on research started in 2017 at AmFam’s data science and analytics lab to simplify the decision-making processes for insurers, lenders, investors and property managers in the real estate industry. Arturo says its tech can generate detailed property information often in under five seconds for its clients.
“By combining property images with our artificial intelligence, we can analyze and evaluate property risk at the pricing, underwriting, and renewal stages of the policy lifecycle, as well as identify which properties should be helped first and where to direct resources during natural disasters,” said Arturo CEO John-Isaac Clark in a statement.
Besides AmFam, Arturo’s clients include Chicago home insurance startup Kin and Openly, another home insurance tech company in Boston.
In addition to the new funding, Arturo also announced that Crosslink’s Managing Partner Davis Silverman is joining its board of directors.
“Crosslink Capital has been looking for an opportunity like Arturo for years,” Silverman said in a statement. “They have a software and data business model that is incredibly scalable, high margin and extensible.”
