Aviva and Founders Factory are today announcing the first five startups selected for its fintech programme and the launch of a brand new startup to make social care easier.
Aviva is a strategic partner of Founders Factory, the accelerator and incubator founded by Brent Hoberman and Henry Lane Fox. The multimillion pound partnership supports Aviva’s broader innovation strategy and will each year support the growth of five high potential early stage startups and jointly establish two new businesses from scratch.
The five startups will receive a range of operational, business and technical support from Aviva to accelerate their development. The first five startups to receive this support are:
Luther Systems a market-leading developer of Blockchain-based products, focused on improving efficiency and transparency of transaction management systems. Together with Luther, Aviva has completed a successful pilot to automate large parts of the supplier invoicing process within supply chains and a further two pilots are in development.
Psious helps patients tackle their mental health problems with virtual reality (VR) technology by simulating real scenarios through VR enabling clinicians to improve their therapies on-site and remotely. Psious has got a great solution to help support people through technology and Aviva looks forward to collaborating with them.
Shepherd monitoring technology can be connected to any machinery to detect anomalies and uses artificial intelligence (AI) to predict when maintenance will be required. Should machinery breakdown, the most relevant people receive alerts removing the need for expensive and irrelevant engineer call outs.
Previse enables faster business payments using AI technology. Late payments from large corporations to small suppliers can bankrupt SMEs and damage the economy. Previse uses the power of artificial intelligence to allow suppliers to receive payments for invoices instantly. Previse have just come on board at Founders Factory across all sectors (i.e. not just limited to Fintech) and raised a £2m seed round this month.
Fitwell helps people stay fit with an AI powered fitness app and wellbeing coach ‘Hailee’ with over one million users globally. Aviva believes their data-led approach can help personalise people’s fitness and keep them motivated.
The first new business to be jointly developed, designed and built by Aviva and Founders Factory is:
OnCare is a software platform for the care industry aiming to make care easier for everyone, starting with an app for care workers to report on each of their visits instead of having to use pen and paper. This not only lets carers spend less time on paperwork and more time delivering care to their clients, but it also unlocks the immense amounts of useful data that were otherwise stored on a piece of paper in the client’s home. Aviva helped identify the inefficiencies in - and people’s frustrations with - the care system which led to the creation of OnCare and have since provided expertise to OnCare and joined it up with care agencies to run full scale pilots.
Startup collaboration is one of the key pillars of Aviva’s innovation strategy, marrying startups’ technical expertise, agility and focus with Aviva’s industry knowledge, brand and access to market. In addition to the partnership with Founders Factory in the UK, Aviva has an extensive startup partnership programme in multiple locations, including Silicon Valley in the US, Canada, Singapore and Israel.
Serge Taborin, Director of Innovation and New Business, Aviva, said:
“The insurance industry is facing some of the biggest challenges in its 300-year history. People’s needs are rapidly evolving, while a number of emerging technologies have the potential to transform insurance and provide numerous opportunities to serve our customers better. Startup collaboration is one of the ways we are tackling this challenge and the Founders Factory partnership has given us access to leading entrepreneurial talent, creating a faster way of trialling innovative customer solutions.”
Henry Lane Fox, Co-Founder and CEO, Founders Factory, said:
“We are providing these startups with an unrivalled platform of support both via our operations team and the insights and scale of Aviva. The five startups selected for the accelerator are incredibly diverse- from VR to blockchain - demonstrating the depth of our ambition to unearth the technologies that will revolutionise insurance and financial services.
“We are also exceptionally excited to be launching OnCare from within our incubator with Aviva. Technology is heavily under-utilised within social care and OnCare represents an important first step in dramatically improving the delivery of care here in the UK and abroad.”