AI start-up Gamalon raised $20 million with lead investor Intel Capital joined by .406 This brings the total investment in US-based AI firm to more than $32 million including the largest single investment by the US Government in next-generation machine learning over the past five years. Existing investors Boston Seed Capital, Felicis Ventures and Rivas Capital also participated in the Series A round. According to Gamalon, it's the first artificial intelligence system that can process natural language and then explain what ideas are present and how they are organized. The first application of technology will be for enterprises to read, understand, and interact with billions of customer messages and provide individual responses.

Over the past five years, we have witnessed substantial startup activity across a broad range of financial services sectors, with fintech funding overall surging from $2.2B in 2011 to $14.4B in 2015 (per CB Insights). Until recently, one of the sub-sectors of financial services that has been somewhat outside of this trend has been property & casualty insurance, which is a multi-trillion global industry and growing. That is now beginning to change as VC investments in insuretech (technology based solutions for insurance) has grown from $130M in 2011 to $1.7B by the end of 2015 (per CB Insights). Building on this momentum, Oliver Wyman sponsored the inaugural InsureTech Connect conference (October 4th – 6th in Las Vegas) bringing together industry incumbents, innovators, and investors to discuss how new technologies -- ranging from big data and online marketplaces to drones and artificial intelligence -- may reshape the insurance industry. At Omidyar Technology Ventures, we are particularly excited about the potential impact of artificial intelligence ("AI") on insurance.