ai-underwriting
(23)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
PayZen
PayZen is a San Francisco-based healthcare fintech that gives patients interest-free, fee-free payment plans for their medical bills while paying providers up front. Founded in 2019 by Itzik Cohen, Tobias Mezger, and Ariel Rosenthal, the company uses AI-driven underwriting to embed personalized financing inside the revenue cycle of hospitals and health systems.
Seel
Seel is a San Francisco-based post-purchase platform that uses AI to underwrite e-commerce returns. Its flagship product, Return Assurance (now branded Worry-Free Purchase), lets shoppers add a refund window to final-sale orders while merchants offload return liability to Seel. The company powers risk-free shopping for hundreds of brands and marketplaces and is building a new category of consumer financial product around the post-purchase moment.