Based in Paris, France, Shift Technology has announced a $220 million Series D led by Advent International. With its latest raise, the insurance fraud detection company has reached a valuation over $1 billion.
Unlike most insurance tech companies that land large rounds, Shift Technology has no ambitions to become an insurance carrier; instead, it will sell its fraud detection technology to insurance carriers of all sizes.
The “Shift Insurance Suite” is its main product offering, and it bundles most of its fraud detection services, including underwriting fraud, shift claims fraud, and financial crime detection, under one service. Shift Technology’s AI is able to help augment decision making by insurance carriers throughout the entirety of a policy’s lifecycle, according to the company. It claims that it can offer these services to auto, health, home, travel, and life insurance carriers, among others.
The latest round brings the company’s coffers to $320 million, according to Crunchbase.
According to Reportlinker, the fraud detection market, just for insurance alone, is going to grow from $2.9 billion in 2019 to $7.9 billion in 2024. That’s a lot of market for upstarts to capture, and is likely fueling investor interest in Shift Technology, which is well positioned to claim the majority of those dollars over time.
Of course, fraud prevention and detection has applications outside of insurance, and investors are betting on a number of upstarts. According to Crunchbase, over a quarter of fraud detection startups funded this year are seed-stage, giving late-stage investors a potentially large pool of candidates to fund in the future.
Notably, Sardine, which raised a $4.6 million seed round, uses AI to near instantaneously identify fraudulent customers on behalf of neobanks.
Given the acceleration of financial services going digital, it’s a safe assumption that fraud detection startups will find dollars so long as they have the technology and talent in place to take advantage of the market.