An Indonesia native is cutting his teeth in Illinois’ robust entrepreneurial ecosystem.

Editor’s Note: This is one in a series of features on Gies teams participating in this year’s Cozad, which culminated in the finals on April 17. This year, 57 Gies-led teams participated in the contest, up from seven in 2024.

Gregorius Aviantoro has interviewed several insurance underwriters and brokers to understand their logistics. Universally, those brokers said getting and organizing information from different stakeholders was the top pain point that slowed the process. His further investigation revealed that communication was an issue for all the stakeholders -- the client, the brokers, and the insurance agents themselves. As a financial analyst intern, he realized that the culprit was often antiquated systems. Through his startup, Otterance, the sophomore finance major at Gies Business is committed to significantly improving the process by providing an AI-powered solution.

“Data entry and operations are slow, which significantly reduces the deal process,” Aviantoro said. “For my internship, I was able to provide a solution that cut down a three-hour process to about 30 minutes. Having that simple solution in place told me there was a lot of potential for improvement in the industry.”

Aviantoro notes that the current status quo is for a broker to be the middleman in the industry, causing a lot of back and forth to collect all the information from clients and potential insurers. He wants to help automate that process and provide a hub that uses AI to take information sent by a client and automatically organize it by priority.

“When a client sends an email, it would automatically scrape and organize it in a database so that brokers can save time by removing the whole data organization process and distribute the information to the insurance market through an automated email., providing limited to no disruption to the communication system,” Aviantoro explained. “By integrating the Otterance extension, it would help all the stakeholders communicate and transfer this information faster in a seamless way without having to download new software or having a new platform.”

Aviantoro discovered that brokers lose 40 percent of their time because of the back and forth and manual data handling required just to provide a quote. In addition to speeding up the communication process, the Otterance AI solution would use historical data to help brokers identify coverage gaps that best align with their clients.

“We estimate that our solution would decrease that lost time by about 60 percent,” Aviantoro said.

Since each state has its own set of regulations, it would be difficult to initially target the insurance brokers in the United States. Instead, Otterance is focusing first on the brokers in Illinois. Aviantoro estimates that if he can get five percent of the market, it will bring in a $38 million opportunity. He notes that while there are a few competitors in this space, they mostly focus on just one channel of communication.

“We have the system integration that works seamlessly as well as a communications hub that helps all three stakeholders,” Aviantoro said.

Through its Origin Ventures Office of Entrepreneurship, Gies College of Business is supporting entrepreneurial activities of both on-campus and online learners. The Origin Ventures Office fosters knowledge creation and dissemination from top faculty in the field, and it designs and offers the curriculum needed to bring that knowledge to the classroom. The office houses the iVenture Accelerator, an accelerator for top student startups at the University of Illinois, and co-sponsors the Cozad New Venture Challenge, which allows University of Illinois startups to compete for a pool of $500,000 in funding. The native of Indonesia has enjoyed taking advantage of Illinois' entrepreneurial ecosystem.

“Since high school, I’ve wanted to build a startup and engage with the entrepreneurial community, and the US seemed like the perfect place to do it,” he said.  “As I investigated further, I noticed that the University of Illinois has a good startup scene and programs like Cozad and iVenture that help students build their ideas.”

Last year, he joined Illinois Enactus, a project-based student organization at Illinois focused on social entrepreneurship, which connected him with other students and faculty with the same passion. He became affiliated with Meta Farm, an Ag Tech student startup that is developing an anaerobic digester for small-scale cattle farmers. The startup pitched at the 2024 Cozad New Venture Challenge.

“Cozad has a lot of advisors with entrepreneurial experience,” Aviantoro said.  “Last year, I learned a lot about how startups work and how to make contacts with venture capitalists and accelerators. That got my foot in the door to the entrepreneurial world. After receiving $50,000 in funding,  we developed the mindset of refining your product, and tried to find solutions to real-world problems, and learned how to pivot.”

Aviantoro used this year’s Cozad to develop his ideas and to make connections with mentors in the insurance space. Beyond the competition, his next goals are to pitch at insurance conferences and to accelerators while he works with his tech lead to develop and refine the prototype. In the fall, he’d like to apply to the gBETA accelerator program.

“From there, I want to validate my idea by continuing to interview people across the different insurance industries,” he said. “I want to make sure that we have a unique solution before investing more time and money into the product. Networking is such an important part, especially in this space.”