property-casualty
(7)Sharon Cooper Left the Newsroom and Took the Story to the Insurance Business
She spent the first act of her career explaining the news on camera. She has spent the second explaining a 115-year-old insurance company to the people who buy from it.
Dan Woods
Dan Woods is the Founder and CEO of Socotra, the AI-native cloud-native insurance core platform he built from scratch starting in 2014. A Stanford AI researcher and former Palantir engineer (employee #20), he left the data-intelligence world to fix insurance technology - an industry he describes as 'a decade behind banking.' Under his leadership, Socotra has raised $87M+ in total funding including a $50M Series C led by Insight Partners, and powers carriers and insurtech MGAs who can now launch insurance products in weeks instead of years.
William Ross
William Ross is the CEO and Co-Founder of Federato, an AI-native insurance technology company that has raised $180M including a $100M Series D led by Goldman Sachs. A Stanford-trained researcher who published wildfire modeling research at NeurIPS 2021, Ross left a career spanning IBM Watson and Venrock to build what the industry calls a 'RiskOps' platform - bringing portfolio-level intelligence to daily underwriting decisions across the $1 trillion+ P&C and specialty insurance market. Federato's revenues tripled year-over-year and the platform now powers insurers managing hundreds of millions in gross written premiums.
Jeff Clarke
Jeff Clarke is the Chief Executive Officer of Insurity, a leading property and casualty insurance software and data analytics company serving 22 of the top 25 P&C carriers in the U.S. A technology industry veteran with 40+ years of experience, Clarke has led some of the most storied corporate transformations in tech history - from rescuing Kodak's film division by rallying Hollywood directors like Christopher Nolan and Quentin Tarantino, to selling Travelport to Blackstone for $4.3 billion. Since joining Insurity in January 2025, he has overseen a $50 million AI and R&D investment push to reshape the insurance technology landscape.
Ray Villeneuve
Ray Villeneuve is the CEO and Board Director of BriteCore, a cloud-native policy administration platform built for mid-size property and casualty insurers and MGAs. Appointed in September 2021 alongside a $20M Series C close led by Warburg Pincus, Villeneuve brings 30+ years of B2B enterprise technology leadership spanning storage (NetApp, Auspex), predictive analytics (MonoSphere/Quest), machine learning (Skytree), AI-powered eCommerce (Reflektion), and industrial AI (Quartic.ai). At BriteCore, he is repositioning the company as the modern core system of choice for the underserved mid-market insurance segment, driving awards recognition (FinTech Breakthrough 2025 Best P&C InsurTech Solution, Top 100 Software Companies 2024), growing to 100+ insurer clients, and building AI-native capabilities including agentic workflows and MCP-standard integration.
Steve Stevens
Steve Stevens (full name: John 'Steve' Stevens) is the Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Jopari Solutions, Inc., a Concord, California-based healthcare IT company he built from the ground up in 2003. Over more than two decades, Stevens transformed Jopari into a dominant force in electronic medical claims, attachments, and payment processing for Property & Casualty, Workers' Compensation, and Group Health markets - connecting 1.5 million healthcare providers with over 5,000 insurance payers and facilitating more than $1 billion in annual payments. In April 2026, Jopari was acquired by Office Ally, capping a career in which Stevens has raised over $100 million in private capital and helped pioneer digital healthcare claims workflows.
Graham Topol
Graham Topol is Co-Founder and Co-CEO of MGT Insurance, the AI-native neo-insurer he built with his brother Michael to fix commercial P&C insurance for America's 35 million small businesses. Before MGT, he sharpened his eye for pattern recognition at FTV Capital's $6.2B fund, helped scale Newfront Insurance past a $2B valuation, and cut his teeth in M&A at Morgan Stanley. Harvard Economics (cum laude) and Stanford GSB MBA in his back pocket, he now runs a company that compressed the traditional two-week insurance quoting process into two minutes - and reached profitability in under two years after raising a $21.6M oversubscribed Series B in October 2025.