Latest / AI.pt / Frank raises €2.9M for insurance brokers, Feedzai Farol cuts fraud alert handling, Universidade de Leiria launches Primal AI
Transcript
- Maya: Hey everyone! Here's what's on the radar today on AI.pt. Frank raised two point nine million for insurance back-office AI, Feedzai's Farol agent cuts fraud alert handling by twenty percent, and Universidade de Leiria e Oeste spun off Primal AI. I'm Maya. James: And I'm James. Let's get into it. Maya: So Frank is a Portuguese startup selling software to insurance brokers, not insurance itself. ECO reports it raised two point nine million for its AI Operator, a virtual assistant that copies what a human does inside brokerage systems and portals. James: That's the key part, Maya. It takes requests from email or WhatsApp, reads the attached documents, flags missing data, then logs into the systems and hands back a quote or claim status. Carlos Siqueira says brokerages report saving about ten administrative hours per broker weekly. Maya: Exactly right, and it's already handling seventy thousand back-office tasks a month across more than three hundred fifty agencies in under a year. Investors are Armilar and Start Ventures, and most of the money goes to continuous training of the Operator. James: Onto Feedzai, the fraud-detection company founded in Portugal. It's putting Farol, an AI agent inside its RiskOps Studio platform, in front of bank fraud teams. Feedzai reports a twenty percent cut in alert handling time, and says it drafts suspicious activity reports up to twelve times faster. Maya: And the pitch is specific, James. Analysts lose their day collecting data before deciding anything. Farol sits in the interface they already use, holds the full case context, runs inside each bank's own environment, and keeps an audit trail. James: That audit trail is the feature to watch. A SAR commits the bank, so every conclusion has to be defensible. One thing to note though, the twenty percent and twelve times figures are Feedzai's own, not yet shown at the banks rolling Farol out. Maya: Fair point, James. They offered it since the twenty-fourth of September, so the real-world numbers are still ahead. Feedzai lists four uses, including reviewing detection rules and flagging ones that raise alerts without ever catching fraud. James: Last one. Universidade de Leiria e Oeste awarded its first spin-off seal to Primal AI, a startup created by its own lecturers. It plugs AI into a company's own software and data, aimed at small and medium-sized companies. Maya: Right, and CEO Sílvio Mendes frames it as a gap in general-purpose tools. They do well on tasks but don't know each company's context. Primal AI connects models to a firm's own data, rules and knowledge, keeping traceability and supervision in place. James: Exactly, Maya. The team is four lecturers plus a management and marketing specialist, growing out of their research projects. Go-to-market starts indirectly, through technology partners building it into their own products, with direct relationships planned to follow progressively. Maya: That's your AI.pt daily brief. Check ai.pt for the full stories.