To celebrate India's rising startups, Inc42 is profiling a new soonicorn every Friday in the Inc42 UpNext: Unicorns Of Tomorrow series. For the next few months, we will be speaking to founders and cofounders at these potential unicorns and shining light on their journeys and growth stories. We begin the series with a look at insurance tech startup RenewBuy. "Our differentiated approach has enabled us to be efficient and productive in a short span and we are confident of being profitable by 2021. We want to be present in every nook and corner of the country."

Insurers faced a pressing problem last year -- a surge in home insurance claims following destructive floods in Kerala. As applications for relief from devastated regions mounted, Reliance General Insurance decided to deploy a video conversation feature, used to process motor vehicle claims, to quicken claims processing. Policy holders went on a two-way video chat to show the extent of damage to the surveyor. The result: Claims got processed in three days from over two weeks earlier. This is just one example of how insurers are using technology to simplify processes and use customer data efficiently.

The BFSI sector has always been the first to experiment and adopt emerging technologies, even when the business case is not so clear. Last year, while the hype about blockchain came down significantly, AI continued to be an increased area of interest. As expected, bots continued to be deployed across the enterprise, and showed the ability to handle queries of increased complexity and scale. Kotak Mahindra Bank's Keya, India's first voice bot in the banking sector, handles more than a million interactions every month and successfully recognises the intent behind 70 per cent of all calls. Similarly, 120 bots deployed at ICICI Lombard General Insurance handle about 90 per cent of policy issuance in near real-time.