Insurance experts have to analyse hundreds or even thousands of pages of case files when processing a medical insurance claim. Achim Kohli knows how arduous this work can be from his previous career as a lawyer.

“Studying the PDF documents is extremely time-consuming. The files have to be clicked on one at a time, and then read, sorted manually and – more importantly – understood,” explains the trained lawyer. “Archived knowledge can't be accessed in a systematic fashion, which makes the work even more difficult.”

This results in long, drawn-out proceedings. An accident victim often doesn't know for months or even years whether and which insurance benefits will be paid. And the insurance company can't plan its resources accurately because there's no way of estimating how the case will turn out.

This state of affairs gave Achim Kohli an idea: intelligent software could speed up the process. He gave up his job at the law firm and founded legal-i in 2019 together with software engineer Markus Baumgartner.

The solution developed by the deep-tech start-up is revolutionary: artificial intelligence extracts the relevant facts from the unstructured medical data and answers experts’ questions at a high medical level and in natural language – in few clicks. Using the software makes people up to 80 percent faster and four times more accurate. This dramatically reduces the time taken to process an accident claim, down from many years to just a few months – a crucial difference when it comes to reintegrating injured and sick people.

“The software is a game-changer for insurance companies, healthcare institutions and law firms,” explains CEO Achim Kohli. In fact, it's a world first: even in the USA, the world’s largest insurance market, there is no AI solution that is at a comparable level of development and offers similar gains in efficiency.

When legal-i was founded, Achim Kohli and Markus Baumgartner teamed up with Bern University of Applied Sciences to test the feasibility of their idea. Together they built a software prototype, with the support of an innovation cheque from Innosuisse. To develop this further, the newly founded start-up launched an innovation project with the same research partner. Between October 2019 and March 2022, the team developed an AI-based research assistant which organises and links data and information relating to medical insurance claims.

Legal-i now had an innovative product – but only in German. However, for Switzerland's trilingual insurance market and the broader international market, the software had to be able to deal with other languages. And so in August 2023 legal-i embarked on an 18-month start-up innovation project.

“We transformed the AI models so that the software can process and understand any European language. This means it can be used in both Europe and the USA,” says Markus Baumgartner, explaining an important milestone for the project.

The software is now fully developed. Following completion of the project in December 2024, the product was launched on the market in January 2025. The start-up will have ten employees and be on the point of breaking even by spring 2025. The two founders agree that without direct support from Innosuisse, their product would never have made it to market.

“For one thing, we wouldn't have been able to get the research and development done fast enough. For another, the support helped us bridge the 'Valley of Death',” says Achim Kohli. This is the point at which many start-ups run out of funds, as the initial investors often drop out while bigger financiers such as venture capital funds remain reluctant to invest because the turnover is still too low. Kohli and Baumgartner successfully overcame this critical stage and have now found private investors for the market phase.

In addition to the financial support, the two founders also benefited from Innosuisse’s two-stage coaching. During the founding phase, Initial Coaching helped get the business model off the ground. In Core Coaching, coaches from Innosuisse ultimately guided the start-up through implementation of its business strategy. Lead coach Christian Brand regularly exchanged ideas with the founders and coordinated the technical support provided by Special Coaches. “The specific expertise helped us a lot,” says Achim Kohli.

Starting in 2025, legal-i will focus on marketing the software. The company already has its first customers in the DACH region, while it is still in the pilot phase in the USA. It aims to conquer the United States by 2028. After all: “If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere,” Kohli says with a smile. legal-i forecasts that sales will triple annually over the next few years. The market potential is huge: “We estimate it at 17 to 20 billion Swiss francs worldwide.”