Uniphore, a speech recognition solutions company, has been named as the winner in LumenLab’s inaugural corporate-startup engagement programme, collab.
Founded in 2009 and with offices in India and Singapore, Uniphore’s solutions extend the power of speech to revolutionise human-machine interaction. This allows any software application to understand and respond to natural human speech, and facilitates both customer engagement and loyalty build. It has worked with over 70 enterprise customers and served over 4 million users.
LumenLab, MetLife’s Singapore-based innovation centre, selected Uniphore following a “demo day” which took place in Singapore. In addition to the overall winner, two outstanding projects, Democrance and Flamingo also received the “Judge’s Selection” award.
collab was launched in November 2016 and it attracted over 135 applications from 34 countries worldwide. Based on known challenges in the areas of customer engagement, sales process, operations, and new business model, eight finalists competed to be the overall winner and receive a US$100,000 contract to implement their solution in
MetLife.
“This competition brought out some of the best start-ups in the insurtech space. We believe that innovation platforms such as collab are key in identifying implementable solutions to better meet the changing needs of our customers,” said Mr Chris Townsend, President, MetLife Asia.
During the demo day event, the finalists presented their business ideas to nine senior MetLife executives. The finalists were allotted 30 minutes to make their pitch and evaluated on their fit to problem statements and the quality of their solutions. Other points of consideration were product differentiation, team experience, and the completeness of their implementation plan.
The eight start-up finalists were Capabiliti, Democrance, Digital Fineprint, Flamingo, Good Parents, Shift Technology, Sureify, and Uniphore. The broad range of solutions showcased included artificial intelligence (AI), predictive analytics and wearables for kids. The finalists received coaching and training from Oliver Wyman, PwC’s venture hub in Singapore, and Velocity (ACP’s accelerator arm).
“The pitches from all our finalists were impressive, which made our job of selecting an overall winner very difficult,” said Mr Zia Zaman, LumenLab CEO and Chief Innovation Officer of MetLife Asia. “We’re excited to work with Uniphore, Democrance, and Flamingo over the coming months to bring their solutions to life at MetLife and have them benefit from our business scale.” A