Federato Raises $80 Million to Revolutionize Insurance Underwriting with AI

Federato announces $80 million raised to bring RiskOps to insurance - StepStone Group (NASDAQ:STEP)

New capital will drive continued global expansion to bring more insurers into the AI era SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 20, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Federato, the AI-native underwriting platform for insurance, announced today that it has raised a total of $80 million, including its latest Series C funding round. The $40 million round was led by global private markets investor StepStone Group STEP, with participation from existing investors, including Emergence Capital, Caffeinated Capital and Pear VC, who together represent over $200 billion in combined assets under management. "We have been closely following Federato's rapid growth over the past five years as an LP in several organizations who have been investors in the company since inception. Founders Will and William's deep expertise in AI and their dedication to bringing a true vertical AI product to the insurance industry is impressive. Federato's fast-growing customer base is a testament to the impact they've already delivered," said John Avirett, Partner at StepStone Group. "We are excited to partner with Federato as they help insurers innovate on business models to better serve challenged markets." Federato's RiskOps platform opens the door to a new era of underwriting for the industry. Insurers have confronted new challenges like climate change, cyber crime, and social inflation over the last decade, and AI is likely to define the winners and losers in the decade to come. RiskOps is about enabling an AI-first mindset that makes risk selection faster and more precise, teams more efficient, and growth more profitable and sustainable. Federato customers regularly see a 90% improvement in time-to-quote, 3x improvement in the proportion of good business bound, and 50-90% reduction in systems used by underwriters. These improvements across the value chain are fundamental to confronting these new challenges while staying efficient and competitive. "When we started with Federato nearly three years ago, we were impressed by the modern underwriting platform they had built. Since then, Federato has become the core engine that powers our growth businesses here in North America. Today, we are leveraging the RiskOps platform as a unified core system for the entire policy lifecycle, from submission to quote, bind, and issue." said Mike Foley, Chief Underwriting Officer, QBE North America. As losses have grown more volatile and less predictable for the insurance industry, the volume of data insurers need to manage has grown faster than it can be organized and used. The combination of these forces has led many large players to pull back from challenged markets, citing a technical inability to effectively price risk. Federato's AI-native RiskOps approach has been particularly impactful in helping insurers confront difficult markets like aviation, commercial trucking, political violence, wildfire, and hurricane while delivering strong baseline efficiencies to more traditional markets. "Velocity is and always has been in the relentless pursuit of a more efficient operation that can serve the challenged coastal wind-exposed property market," said Rod Harden, President, Velocity Risk, an MGA/carrier hybrid specializing in E&S property insurance. "In order to do that, we need an underwriting platform that can keep up with the complexity and speed of our business. Federato has delivered on those needs and pushed us to constantly iterate and improve on our processes, driving a 3.7x increase in the percentage of our bound policies that meet our definition of high appetite." While Federato already helps thousands of underwriters focus on the highest-value business across global carriers, MGAs, and mutuals, this funding will be used to drive Federato's continued global presence in the UK, Europe, LATAM, and APAC markets. On the round and its significance, Will Ross, co-founder and CEO of Federato said, "We couldn't be more elated that our investors and customers feel the momentum of RiskOps in insurance the way we do. We see this financing as a milestone of continued progress and not an achievement in and of itself. That achievement lies in the value we are creating each and every day for our customers and the communities they serve. Onward!" About Federato Federato is bringing RiskOps to insurance to help underwriters win the right deals, faster. From the moment a submission hits an underwriter's email or portal, RiskOps puts AI to work, triaging submissions with a focus on high-appetite business, delivering real-time feedback on the portfolio, and consolidating workflows into a single proven system. Federato delivers the transformation required to drive profitable growth, providing confidence that teams will stick to the plan, because their unique portfolio goals, strategies, rules, and appetite are built into the core system through which they transact business. About StepStone StepStone Group Inc. STEP is a global private markets investment firm focused on providing customized investment solutions and advisory and data services to its clients. As of September 30, 2024, StepStone was responsible for approximately $682 billion of total capital, including $176 billion of assets under management. StepStone's clients include some of the world's largest public and private defined benefit and defined contribution pension funds, sovereign wealth funds and insurance companies, as well as prominent endowments, foundations, family offices and private wealth clients, which include high-net-worth and mass affluent individuals. StepStone partners with its clients to develop and build private markets portfolios designed to meet their specific objectives across the private equity, infrastructure, private debt and real estate asset classes. View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/federato-announces-80-million-raised-to-bring-riskops-to-insurance-302311553.html SOURCE Federato Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs

Federato fixes insurance risk analysis with AI, raises $40M

Insurance has been fertile ground for artificial intelligence innovation, working as it does at the nexus of giant datasets, risk assessment, predictive analytics, fintech and customer service. Federato, a startup riding that momentum, has now raised $40 million to expand its business: an AI-powered underwriting platform to help insurers better understand and respond to risk. Stepstone Group is leading the round with previous backers Emergence Capital, Caffeinated Capital and Pear VC participating. The startup has now raised $80 million in total. It is not disclosing valuation, CEO and co-founder Will Ross confirmed in an interview that it was a "serious, significant upround" that was multiples bigger than its previous valuation. For some context, Federato's last valuation was $125 million based on a fundraise from last year. Further context is that Duck Creek, one of its competitors, was snapped up by Visa Equity for $2.6 billion in 2023. The latter company offers a wider set of SaaS for insurance companies, it does show you directionally where the valuation for a lucrative AI product aimed at this sector could go. (Insurance, globally, is estimated to be one of the biggest industries in the world, totalling multiple trillions of dollars in value, with underwriting one of key areas where AI is expected to play a major role.) Federato was co-founded by Will Ross (CEO) and William Steenbergen (CTO). Ross was one of the early employees at the Watson group at IBM, where he worked on the deal to buy the Weather Company and leverage the data from there to build environmental models. Later he went back to graduate school at Stanford, where he met the other William (Steenbergen). It was 2021 and AI was already all the rage (January 2021 was the month OpenAI released Dall-E, its image generator). But it was already being positioned by many as a replacement for repetitive work. "We had a shared thesis that AI could better be applied to optimizing what no human could do or had time to do, versus automating away low value tasks," Ross said. "The analogy here is Uber, DoorDash. These are consumer companies, but they solve a problem no human had the time to effectively solve. And those tend to look like these optimization problems." Ross was in the business school, and Steenbergen was in working in computational and mathematical engineering. "We were actually collaborating on a very different project, a wildfire modeling project," Ross continued. "And we started to get to know the insurance industry, because they were interested in the wildfire modeling." That in turn led the pair to thinking about the wider challenges in insurance: typically when insurance companies are working through an underwriting process and coming up with how to cost a product against the risk around it; or even what products to build at all, there will be a team in-house bringing together vast amounts of data both directly and indirectly related to potential insurance scenarios, crunching numbers to get better insight and make more informed selections. Federato's solution, which the company calls RiskOps, provides decision support around that process. The startup claims that customers see 90% improvement in "time to quote" (how long it takes to give a quote on a particular service in aid of winning a sale) among other efficiency improvements. The pair's initial foray into modelling wildfires led to one of its early customers, Kettle: a reinsurance platform that has up to now mostly focused on one market, California, and one big problem: reinsurance and fire catastrophes, a big issue in the state. It also counts larger companies like Nationwide among its customers. While speed is definitely something that AI brings to bear in its work, another important aspect here is how it is used to evaluate large amounts of data, an important part of the diligence that insurance companies must go through in their work. "We are in the land of Facebook, and moving fast and breaking things," Lotti Siniscalco, a partner at Emergence, said. "But in insurance you cannot do that."