An insurance agent tasked with determining if a bar is properly covered for activities that don’t go beyond the usual libations might only visit a location once a month to see if a dancefloor is suddenly drawing crowds.
But what if that adjuster could sit in front of a computer and check in on the same business almost every day based on automated monitoring of changes to the bar’s Facebook page?
If the bar insured simply for sips of booze is suddenly advertising DJ nights on Facebook — and the ensuing potential for injuries that come with it — a system developed in Vancouver is now sending alerts to the insurer.
“It's a way for them to be able to upsell a client that will not actually disclose what they're doing inside,” said Serge Salager, CEO of Visualping (WebMonitoring Services Inc.).
His company’s platform, which detects changes on websites and then alerts users, has been tapped for uses far beyond determining if bars are skimping out on their insurance policies.
As the pandemic upended daily lives, users — now totalling 1.5 million globally — began monitoring grocery store websites for updates on toilet paper being restocked.
And with mass vaccinations now underway, about 60,000 Americans have been tapping the platform to determine whether vaccine appointments are opening up on booking websites.
Visualping’s capability is also catching the eye of investors.
The company revealed this week the close a US$2-million seed round led by Mistral Venture Partners Inc. and N49P Inc.
The fresh capital is going towards boosting headcount (it currently has 14 people on the roster, all based in B.C.), ramping up sales and marketing, and expanding its enterprise offerings.
“The consumers tend to have a lot of churn, very low willingness to pay, they expect it for free. It's a difficult market,” said Salager, a former BIV Forty Under 40 winner.
“On the enterprise market, users will be tracking competitors, will be tracking social media mentions or mentions in Yelp about your business. You can do pretty cool things like sentiment analysis: So only interrupt me whenever there's a negative comment, as opposed to alerting you for a [single] comment.”
Consumer subscriptions start for free but go up to $97, while enterprise subscriptions currently range from $20 to $135 a month.
As the company draws a bead on enterprise users, Salager said Visualping will also be investing heavily in boosting its marketing efforts.
“Eighty per cent of our traffic comes from Google, from people searching for the need,” he said.
“There are other use cases, like competitive intelligence, where we don't rank. So obviously we’re going to invest in Google ads and retargeting.”
He added additional capital will also be invested in machine learning that will help stymie some of the false positives users might get, such as alerts from websites updated to reflect very miniscule price drops for in-demand products.
“The machine learning aspect would come from learning what are the settings that people are using for specific pages, and any new user will benefit from that input from other users,” Salager said.
“We have a database which is billions of data points, but we're not actually harnessing that to help consumers.”
