ai-underwriting
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NFTYDoor Turned a 45-Day HELOC Into a Weekend Product - Here’s the Workflow Lenders Can Copy
The McLean fintech found its wedge in the boring handoffs that make home-equity lending crawl. After an acquisition and a return to independence, its most useful lesson is not “add AI” - it is to own the whole wait.
The Insurance Policy That Watches the Weather, Not the Wreckage
Arbol turns rainfall, wind speed and temperature into financial triggers. Its wager is that climate insurance can move faster when the argument over damage is replaced by a line in the data.
RentFlow
RentFlow is a New York fintech, part of Y Combinator's Summer 2024 batch, that builds a 'Buy Now, Pay Later' layer for commercial rent. It pays landlords their full rent on the 1st of the month, then lets business tenants repay in smaller installments synced to their real cash flow. The company pairs payments infrastructure with AI underwriting that reads transaction-level and behavioral signals to price flexibility, aiming to keep otherwise-healthy small and medium businesses from being pushed into default by a single fixed lump-sum bill.
Flow48
Flow48 is a Dubai-based fintech that gives small and medium businesses in emerging markets fast access to working capital by turning their future revenue and unpaid invoices into upfront cash. Founded in 2022 by serial entrepreneur Idriss Al Rifai, the company uses a proprietary, data-driven underwriting engine to approve non-dilutive, collateral-free financing of up to $20 million, typically disbursing funds within 24 to 48 hours. Operating across the UAE and South Africa with expansion into Saudi Arabia, Flow48 raised a $69 million Series A in February 2025 to close the SME funding gap that traditional banks leave open.
Fluid
Fluid is a Singapore-based B2B payments platform that lets suppliers and marketplaces offer their business buyers flexible credit terms and installments at the point of purchase. Its AI underwriting engine approves buyers in seconds, pays suppliers on day one, and automates reconciliation - bringing consumer-grade buy-now-pay-later mechanics to business commerce across Southeast Asia. Founded in early 2023 by former Atome and Uber operators, Fluid has raised US$7M and serves 3,000+ businesses across Singapore and Malaysia.
Otonomi
Otonomi is a New York-based insurtech that sells parametric insurance for cargo delays and disruptions across air, ocean, and e-commerce parcel shipments. Instead of the traditional claims process, its platform uses AI/ML underwriting, real-time shipment tracking, and blockchain-backed settlement to quote in seconds and pay out automatically once a delay crosses a defined threshold - regardless of cause. Founded in 2021 by Yann Barbarroux and Jeremy Sutton, the company targets freight forwarders, shippers, and brokers moving time-critical goods such as pharmaceuticals, perishables, high-tech components, and automotive parts.
Foresight
Foresight is a San Francisco-based commercial insurtech that ties safe work practices to insurance savings. It writes workers' compensation coverage for hard-to-place middle-market businesses in industries like construction, manufacturing, agriculture and landscaping, bundling its Safesite safety platform, virtual safety coaching and AI-informed underwriting into every policy to prevent injuries, reduce claims and lower rates.
David Fontain
David Fontain is the co-founder and CEO of Foresight, a San Francisco insurtech that pairs workers' compensation coverage with its own safety technology, Safesite. An Australian who grew up on the Gold Coast and started out in investment banking, he built Foresight after a childhood friend died in a preventable workplace accident. The company underwrites for hard-to-place middle-market businesses in industries like construction and manufacturing, using an 'engage and save' model that rewards safer companies with faster premium relief. Foresight has raised tens of millions from investors including OMERS Ventures, and its technology is credited with cutting workplace incident frequency by double digits.
Slice Labs
Slice Labs is a New York-based insurtech that builds cloud-based, digital-first insurance products. Founded in 2015 by Tim Attia, Stuart Baserman and Ernest Hursh, Slice pioneered the first on-demand, pay-as-you-go insurance in the US and later opened its Insurance Cloud Services (ICS) platform so insurers, carriers and technology companies could launch their own digital products. Its Slice Mind engine applies machine learning and, more recently, large language models to underwriting, risk scoring and claims. Today Slice operates as a tech-driven provider of Excess & Surplus (E&S) insurance for small-to-midsize commercial businesses across 40+ US states.
Gage Caligaris
Gage Caligaris is the founder and CEO of Ledgebrook, a tech-enabled managing general agent (MGA) modernizing the Excess and Surplus (E&S) specialty insurance market. A Harvard-trained applied mathematician and former Barclays commodity derivatives trader, he spent eight-plus years as an actuary at Liberty Mutual, where he became the fastest person ever to pass the Casualty Actuarial exams and later scaled a new-mobility products line from under $50M to over $450M in gross written premium. He founded Ledgebrook in 2022 to pair modern engineering with deep insurance expertise, reaching a $100M run rate in under two years and raising an oversubscribed $65M Series C in 2025. In 2026 he was named an EY Entrepreneur Of The Year New England Award winner.
Anzen
Anzen is a San Francisco insurtech building Anzen Pro, an AI-powered operating system for commercial insurance distribution. It reads brokers' emails, attachments and forms, turns unstructured submissions into structured data, routes each account to the right underwriters across a network of 130+ carriers and 500+ underwriting contacts, then compares quotes and generates proposals automatically. Started in 2020 as a marketplace for executive risk coverage, Anzen now helps thousands of retail agents automate submissions, quoting, compliance, renewals and claims - work that has stayed stubbornly manual in the commercial insurance industry.
Shepherd
Shepherd is a San Francisco insurtech that writes commercial insurance for builders and infrastructure operators. Founded in 2020, it pairs proprietary AI underwriting with real-time construction data to price and issue excess liability, primary casualty and builder's risk policies in hours rather than weeks. Once focused on middle-market general contractors, Shepherd now insures the physical layer of the AI boom - data centers, semiconductor plants and energy assets - having covered more than $400 billion in project value across 1,500-plus policies for 600-plus customers.
Tim Attia
Tim Attia is the co-founder and CEO of Slice Labs, a New York insurtech he launched in 2015 to sell insurance the way the on-demand economy actually works - in bite-size, pay-per-use chunks bought the moment a homeshare host or rideshare driver needs it. Trained as an electrical engineer at McGill and shaped by three decades moving between consulting firms and insurance carriers, Attia built Slice into a cloud platform (Insurance Cloud Services) that lets incumbents like AXA XL, Progressive, Lenovo and Microsoft spin up digital insurance products, and more recently he has been pushing the company toward AI, machine learning and large language models to automate underwriting and claims.
Arlo
Arlo is a New York-based health insurance startup rebuilding coverage for small and mid-sized businesses. It pairs AI-driven underwriting with value-based care and cost transparency to offer level-funded plans that make big-company benefits available to teams of roughly 10 to 150 employees, without the big-company admin. Founded in 2022 by former Palantir team lead Jan-Felix Schneider and ex-Finch engineering lead Karthik Bhaskara, Arlo raised a $4M seed round in 2025 led by Upfront Ventures and works with reinsurer Nationwide.
Tirios
Tirios is an Austin-based proptech platform that lets everyday investors buy fractional shares of single-family rental homes for as little as $100. It uses AI to source and underwrite properties, records ownership on blockchain via tokenization, and manages the homes end-to-end - collecting rent, paying expenses, and distributing quarterly dividends. Founded in 2021 by former Icahn Enterprises executive Sachin Latawa, Tirios is SEC-qualified under Regulation A+ and pitches itself as a vertically integrated, low-fee way to make real estate investing accessible to millennials and first-time investors.
Jan-Felix Schneider
Jan-Felix Schneider is the co-founder and CEO of Arlo, a New York health insurance company rebuilding coverage for small and mid-sized businesses from the ground up. A former Palantir deployment strategist and McKinsey consultant who grew up in Germany, he pairs a Columbia data science background with a plain conviction that people should not go broke while insured. Under his lead, Arlo underwrites its own level-funded plans, supports members directly, and builds its own technology - scaling to tens of thousands of covered lives and hundreds of employer groups, reaching profitability, and raising a $4M seed in 2025.
Sachin Latawa
Sachin Latawa is the founder and CEO of Tirios, an Austin-based proptech platform that lets everyday people invest in single-family rental homes for as little as $100. Before building Tirios, he ran real estate for Carl Icahn's empire as CFO of Real Estate at Icahn Enterprises, where he managed more than $1.1 billion in assets across homebuilding, distressed assets, resorts, offices and industrial property. He now pairs that institutional pedigree with AI-driven underwriting and blockchain tokenization to crack open a $10 trillion asset class that, by his own count, only about 5% of people can actually reach.
Clearco
Clearco is a Toronto-based fintech that gives ecommerce and direct-to-consumer brands fast, non-dilutive growth capital - founders raise money without giving up equity or signing personal guarantees. Using AI to read revenue, marketing spend and sales data, Clearco offers cash advances, invoice funding and rolling capacity repaid as a share of revenue. Founded in 2015 as Clearbanc by Michele Romanow and Andrew D'Souza, the company has deployed more than $3 billion to over 10,000 brands and, after a 2023 recapitalization, relaunched a rebuilt funding platform under CEO Andrew Curtis.
Delos Insurance Solutions
Delos Insurance Solutions is a San Francisco insurtech and managing general agent that uses satellite imagery, fire science, and machine learning to insure California homeowners in wildfire-prone areas that traditional carriers have abandoned. Founded by two aerospace engineers, Delos models wildfire risk at the individual-property level using NASA Earth-observation data, climate science, and hundreds of risk parameters, allowing it to write coverage on homes the rest of the market deems uninsurable.
Kafene
Kafene is a New York-based fintech that gives retailers a point-of-sale lease-to-own option for shoppers who get turned away by traditional credit. Using a machine-learning model that weighs more than 20,000 data points, Kafene approves customers in seconds for purchases up to about $5,000 - furniture, appliances, electronics, tires - then lets them lease the item and either pay it off to own it or return it without penalty. It positions itself as a transparent, debt-free alternative to buy-now-pay-later for the roughly 100 million Americans with limited or no prime credit.
MGT Insurance
MGT Insurance is a vertically AI-native neo-insurer rebuilding commercial property and casualty insurance for the roughly 35 million small businesses in the United States and the brokers who serve them. Founded in 2022 by brothers Graham and Michael Topol, MGT owns the full stack - intake, underwriting, distribution, policy delivery and servicing - on a modern technology platform, letting agents quote and often bind Business Owner Policies in minutes rather than days or weeks. The company writes BOP in 42-plus states and D.C., serves nearly 30,000 customers, holds an A- (Excellent) rating from AM Best, and closed an oversubscribed $21.6M Series B in October 2025 led by Mubadala Capital.
Modern Life
Modern Life is an AI-powered, tech-enabled life insurance brokerage that gives financial advisors a single platform to quote, underwrite, and manage life insurance policies. Founded in 2021 by Michael Konialian and Jack Arenas and backed by Thrive Capital, it replaces a stack of 10+ fragmented legacy tools, compares quotes across 30+ carriers, and uses accelerated underwriting to cut policy cycle times from roughly six months to minutes. Licensed in all 50 states, the company raised a $20M Series A in November 2025, bringing total funding to $35M.
Sixfold
Sixfold is a New York-based enterprise AI company building purpose-built artificial intelligence for insurance underwriters. Its platform learns a carrier's risk appetite, reads and summarizes complex submissions, surfaces cited risk signals, and deploys AI agents that research, write referrals, and advance cases - so underwriters spend their time on judgment instead of paperwork. The company serves global carriers, MGAs, and reinsurers across property & casualty and life & health, and has processed more than a million submissions for insurers representing hundreds of billions in gross written premium.
Jeannie Tarkenton
Jeannie Tarkenton is the founder and CEO of Funding U (Funding University), an Atlanta-based fintech lender that makes no-cosigner student loans to high-achieving, low-income undergraduates based on grades, grit and trajectory rather than a parent's credit score. A Princeton English major who spent a decade in Atlanta education nonprofits, she built an AI underwriting model that reads transcripts and internships instead of FICO and balance sheets. Since 2018 the company has deployed well over $125 million to thousands of mostly first-generation students, and counts Goldman Sachs and her former college roommate MacKenzie Scott among its backers.
Michael Konialian
Michael Konialian is the founder and CEO of Modern Life, an AI-powered life insurance brokerage built for financial advisors. After a winding path from aerospace structures at NASA to nuclear diplomacy at the U.S. State Department to scaling CoverWallet's advisor business into an Aon acquisition, he was floored by how confusing, invasive, and outdated it was to buy life insurance for his own family. Modern Life is his answer: a single dashboard that lets advisors pull instant quotes from 30-plus carriers and compress a process that once took six months into minutes. In November 2025 the company raised a $20M Series A led by Thrive Capital, bringing total funding to $35M.
Michael Topol
Michael Topol is the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of MGT Insurance, a San Francisco-based company he runs with his brother Graham and describes as the world's first vertically AI-native neo-insurer for commercial property and casualty risk. After helping scale the insurtech Collective Health from 30 to more than 500 employees and a stint in investment banking at Morgan Stanley, he set out to rebuild a commercial insurance carrier from the ground up on a modern AI stack. Two years in, MGT has reached profitability, signed roughly 30,000 customers, posted about $3 million of recurring revenue per employee, and closed an oversubscribed $21.6M Series B led by Mubadala Capital in October 2025.
Michael Ulin
Michael Ulin is a three-time AI founder and engineer who builds machine-learning companies in heavily regulated industries. He was the founding AI engineer and VP of AI at ZestyAI, whose property-risk models help underwrite trillions in U.S. insured assets, then co-founded and served as CTO of Paxton AI, a generative-AI legal research tool used by thousands of attorneys that raised a $6M seed round in 2023. He now builds from Bend, Oregon, where his current work centers on Trarian, applying AI to patent underwriting, alongside ventures spanning AI forecasting and probabilistic reasoning. He also writes the Substack 'And Yet It Moves' on entrepreneurship and the case for building startups outside Silicon Valley.
Kalepa
Kalepa is a New York-based insurtech building AI software for commercial insurance underwriters. Its flagship platform, Copilot, ingests submissions, extracts and structures messy documents, surfaces hidden risk exposures from billions of data points, and helps underwriters triage, price, and bind business faster and more profitably. Founded in 2018 by Paul Monasterio and Daniel Hillman, the company is backed by Inspired Capital and IA Ventures and works with carriers including Munich Re Specialty, Bowhead Specialty, SECURA, and Canopius.
Cowbell
Cowbell is a Pleasanton-based insurtech that sells adaptive cyber insurance to small and mid-sized businesses, using an AI-driven continuous underwriting platform that scores cyber risk and can issue a policy in under five minutes.
Federato
Federato is an AI-native insurance platform built around a framework it calls RiskOps - software that connects portfolio strategy to the day-to-day decisions underwriters make on individual policies. Founded in 2020 by Stanford researchers Will Ross and William Steenbergen, the company sells to property-and-casualty carriers, MGAs and mutuals, and reports customers regularly see a 90% improvement in time-to-quote and a 3x lift in profitable business bound. In November 2025 it raised a $100M Series D led by Goldman Sachs Alternatives.