COVID-19 has impacted every sector of the economy, and insurance is no exception. Insurers around the world had scrambled to weather the disruption and many were able to quickly adapt to this new reality, and embrace digital technologies for customer engagement.

The pandemic has highlighted inefficiencies and has validated the industry’s efforts to innovate and invest in a digital future. Insurtech is likely to play a vital, ongoing role in bringing digital innovation to the insurance sector overall. One of the new players in the industry is Plaved Survey, aiming to enable insurers to fully embrace this remote first future.

This week we caught up with Carles Brunet Medina, the Founder of Plaved Survey to dive deeper into how they are disrupting the insurance space. Enjoy!

The startup at a glance

Startup Name: Plaved Survey

Industry: Insurtech

Location: Spain

Date founded: November, 2021

Number of employees: 2

Vonage API used: Video and SMS API

In one sentence, what does Plaved Survey do?

Plaved Survey is a platform where surveyors and insurance adjusters can remotely inspect damage or goods.

What is the problem you are solving? Was this the initial problem or did you pivot?

The industry of insurance has been evolving a lot, and in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic surveyors and expert cabinets had to develop their daily jobs remotely. This opened a business model where Plaved Survey takes action, Remote Surveying. Our platform enables the user to accelerate its workflow by reducing expenses in money, time, and mind wear. From home, from the office, or from anywhere, our users are able to interact with the affected peers and solve (or at least, have a first contact) the problems as soon as possible.

What differentiates Plaved Survey from your competitors? Is there a secret sauce?

There always is a secret sauce. We love competition because it makes us innovate and keep improving our product day to day. The main fact that leads to this is illusion, because we are teenagers and we want to eat the world. But yes, our main goal is to build a solution for people, for everybody, for all the experts that need help in digital transformation and in a step to a greener economy (reducing CO2 footprint on our daily basis).

VC, Angel, Bootstrap or Other?

It has been mainly bootstrapped, we have now some early adopters using the MVP for its businesses, and helping us move faster to a step forward in our course. But we are looking for more ;)

What’s the biggest challenge you faced and how did you overcome it?

Actually, the biggest challenge we have is to gain confidence and gain a foothold in the market that we are addressing, because there are other similar solutions already being used but we truly know that there are things that people need which are ready to come.

The biggest mistake Plaved Survey has made so far and what did you learn from it?

In a startup project, errors appear everyday. We are constantly communicating with our network of mentors and counsellors and adding new features to the platform. We need to be updating code and patching the apps daily because cybersecurity is a must in this kind of tools and our clients must feel safe and comfortable.

You can choose one to be on your board: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates. Who do you choose and why?

In my opinion, they all are brilliant people and incredible founders, but if we could have one on our board Elon will be the one. Our mindset and the mindset that Elon has shown publicly is nearly the same, and synergy will probably be the key performance indicator that will lead to success.

How have you been using Vonage’s APIs?

We have used Vonage APIs since before the public launch of the platform. We use the Communication APIs for the SMS part of our app and for client engagement, and parts of the Video API for the workflow of the remote surveying because Vonage offers us security, scalability and stability in all sessions.

What progress have you made since launching?

We have improved our MVP a lot, mainly obtained info about what our clients desired and added new functionalities to the app that allow things like GPS location and proof validation through cutting-edge mechanisms. We also moved from Twilio to Vonage because Vonage brought us the care, help and technologies that we needed for our project.

What’s next for Plaved Survey? Where do you want to be in 3 years?

We have just joined Vonage Startups family, and we are trying to build a network with some incubators and accelerators to develop the project and its business model. In my opinion, Plaved in 3 years should have become the reference apps provider for surveyors and bureaus, or pivoted to the niche that suits best the goal of the project: simplifying workflows to make life easier.

Furthermore, and technically talking, we are preparing a Native app for iOS and Android, where users that become clients of our Premium plan will be able to scan documents, administrate their sessions from a handheld device, take photos in-place and add them to the session started with the remote survey, generate PDF reports, add appointments to the device’s calendar, interact with the session map and location and lots more that are willing to come.

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