Scouting for Growth

• Amrit Santhirasenan Talks Agentic Underwriting… From Theory to Enterprise Transformation

  On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to Amit Santhirasenan, co-founder and CEO of hyperexponential, an actuary and software engineer who has built the AI native pricing and underwriting platform used by leading specialty carriers. In this episode we cover how to turn messy submissions into structured signals your pricing model can trust – without hiring an army, multi agent architectures, the agentic AI mesh, and the human in the loop controls executives need for auditability and speed, and where agentic underwriting is ready today (and where it isn’t), plus the metrics executives should track—cycle time, hit ratio, and loss ratio uplift. KEY TAKEAWAYS Email submissions were a luxury at the start of my career! What’s been so exciting for me, as a self-professed nerd, is the pace at which the capabilities of core models have got so good that even 6 months ago was a whole product’s capability and feature set is now within the gift of Gemini or GPT5. If you’re an underwriter filling out a spreadsheet/renew model, in 2025 you need to be working with hx underwriting , actuary or agent inside a renew model to have your paired partner helping you get to the best result. Why can’t you have deep risk research on every single risk? Why can’t you say: Tell me the most important characteristics in the world that you can tell me about the top 3 exposures? No human can do this work, the cost/benefit trade off there isn’t economic, but you can run an OpenAI deep risk API call to do that on every single risk you underwrite today. We do it for you, it’s what we do. All of a sudden it’s dramatically easier to bring that level of differentiation and specialism in the way that great underwriting has always been done to every single risk you want to touch. BEST MOMENTS ‘You won’t see that many places with a $7 trillion contribution to GDP, with such a small number of companies and people responsible for this.’ ‘We demonstrated the first API machine vision algorithm in the market in 2017, now kids coming out of university are doing that as toy projects before they get to our clients.’ ‘You can have an army of digital agents helping you now, all for $20 per month!’ ‘Generative AI models have unlocked the ability to pull data so quickly out of the information required for underwrite that you can put a very quick red/amber/green status on risks, several orders of magnitude greater than ever before.’ ABOUT THE GUESTS Amit Santhirasenan is the Co-founder and CEO of Hyperexponential (hx), the AI native pricing and underwriting platform for P&C insurers. Under his leadership, hx Renew has become known for delivering executive level outcomes: ~50% faster submission to bind, 10× faster model build and deployment, and a platform that supports $45bn+ in GWP for 20+ enterprise customers worldwide. A qualified actuary and computer scientist, Amrit previously spent over a decade in the London Market. He served as Head of Pricing & Analytics at Tokio Marine Kiln, building the managing agent’s first technical pricing team to support ~£1.5bn GWP, and earlier held actuarial roles at Catlin (including standing up the Canadian actuarial function). ABOUT THE HOST Sabine is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur. She is the CEO and Managing Partner of Alchemy Crew a venture lab that accelerates the curation, validation, & commercialization of new tech business models. Sabine is renowned within the insurance sector for building some of the most renowned tech startup accelerators around the world working with over 30 corporate insurers, accelerated over 100 startup ventures. Sabine is the co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, a top 50 Women in Tech, a FinTech and InsurTech Influencer, an investor & multi-award winner. Twitter LinkedIn Instagram Facebook TikTok Email Website This Podcast has been brought to you by Disruptive Media. https://disruptivemedia.co.uk/

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• Will Ross The Federato Playbook — RiskOps, Appetite, and Winnability for Profitable Growth

  On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to Will Ross, Co-Founder & CEO of Federato, and if you’re an underwriting transformation leader—drowning in Excel, stale pilots, and disconnected data sources—this episode is for you. Will Ross isn’t here to sell you hype. He’s here to show what it looks like when AI actually delivers: faster quotes, better decisions, happier underwriters, and measurable results before the next board meeting. KEY TAKEAWAYS Thinking back to when Amazon released the Echo with Alexa and a bunch of us bought them and took them apart to figure out how it worked reminds me of how Wild West the early days of AI was a decade and a half ago. Now any undergraduate student taking computer science will have some exposure to AI. One of the first things they might learn is how to do simple tasks like that on very little computational resource. I love jumping into our products like that to understand how they work. Break down what AI means: There’s an idea of intelligence or grasping a concept or knowledge, then there’s artificial – doing something in place of a human. You can take it a step further and look at ‘generative’ – generating a thing, or predictive – predicting a thing, agentic – giving it agency and allowing it to complete a task.  What is it that humans do today and, theoretically, what could humans do if they had unlimited time to do their jobs? For underwriters, the process is similar across many line of business: you analyse an exposure, loss history and loss control to come up with a rate perspective, etc. Where can AI systems interact with that process? BEST MOMENTS ‘One of the things I think is really scary with AI today is its perpetuation of news cycles and how fast it spreads.’  ‘No matter how sceptical people are, the vast majority of people are already using these technologies to do their jobs. By bringing them into the room, making them aware of what this technology does, and letting the interact with it, that’s a powerful thing.’ ‘There are going to be jobs that change, but we shouldn’t think about it as AI replacing our jobs, we should think about it as someone using AI to do our job who will replace us.’ ‘What we call AI today will change and change again because it always has; Deep Blue used to be called AI and is now called a chess simulator.’ ABOUT THE GUESTS William Ross is a product and operations leader obsessed with solving the toughest problems in insurance with a mix of pragmatism, speed, and machine learning. As a core member of the Federato leadership team, Will focuses on one mission: turning underwriting from a slow, manual grind into a dynamic, data-driven advantage. At Federato, Will is helping specialty and commercial carriers build resilience and growth into their underwriting operations, showing chief underwriting and transformation officers that AI doesn’t need to be another failed pilot—it can be the competitive edge that secures market share today. LinkedIn ABOUT THE HOST Sabine is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur. She is the CEO and Managing Partner of Alchemy Crew a venture lab that accelerates the curation, validation, & commercialization of new tech business models. Sabine is renowned within the insurance sector for building some of the most renowned tech startup accelerators around the world working with over 30 corporate insurers, accelerated over 100 startup ventures. Sabine is the co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, a top 50 Women in Tech, a FinTech and InsurTech Influencer, an investor & multi-award winner. Twitter LinkedIn Instagram Facebook  TikTok Email Website This Podcast has been brought to you by Disruptive Media. https://disruptivemedia.co.uk/

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• Sara Mikulski: One Source of Truth, Zero Excuses

  On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to Sara Mikulski, CTO at Kingstone Insurance about the moment in her career that convinced her that the claims ecosystem could be rebuilt around a single, trusted data spine. KEY TAKEAWAYS When I started my career success looked like stabilisation: Getting to a point where we all understand what’s happening in which system, where the data is, and just make it work. It wasn’t a long-term scalable solution, but I didn’t want to come into the organisation and disrupt it. It wasn’t ready yet, the first 18 months was about learning what was working and what wasn’t before making a move to address the concerns and questions in a scalable way. Between then and now we’ve changed the entire platform and focussed on ensuring that there were good processes that were understood, good data in the right places so that we could have more automation and potential for AI in the future. This has made our adjustors so happy, as well as us from an IT perspective where it’s easier to maintain, help and administer, etc. A lot of AI initiatives that are large and impact your core systems don’t always go as expected. The biggest learning we’ve had, as an organisation, over the last year was to not run before you can walk. Sometimes you think AI can fix the problem or the process, but when you start to talk it through or dissect it, you find out you could simply tweak the system to be better for the people using it or explore a different way of doing the process. BEST MOMENTS ‘There were less emotional decisions in the first place because we took our time and really thought things through.’ ‘You have to focus on how to make that one place your place – making sure the data that in there is clean, true, what data is there, what data your adjustors need to go outside of the system for and why.’ ‘Efficiency is king right now, which is why AI is getting such a movement behind it; you’re trying to find places where you don’t have to do something manually, or something that takes hours and condensing it to seconds.’ ‘AI will play an enormous role in current and future processes at all insurance carriers, but you still have to go back to the basics and figure out if you’re just trying to put a band aid on the problem or if you’re trying to solve it long-term.’ ABOUT THE GUESTS Sara Mikulski is Chief Technology Officer at Kingstone Insurance and is responsible for managing our IT organization and accountable for the company’s systems and data strategy, IT security, infrastructure, development, support, and vendor management. Sara brings 15+ years of experience in the IT arena, leading effective teams and enhancing IT operations. Most recently, she was the Deputy CIO at UPC Insurance, where she was responsible for the delivery of numerous projects aimed at consolidation of platforms and reduction of technical debt. She also held leadership and technical IT positions within the insurance industry at Esurance. Ms. Mikulski also worked at several other companies in various IT-focused roles. LinkedIn ABOUT THE HOST Sabine is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur. She is the CEO and Managing Partner of Alchemy Crew a venture lab that accelerates the curation, validation, & commercialization of new tech business models. Sabine is renowned within the insurance sector for building some of the most renowned tech startup accelerators around the world working with over 30 corporate insurers, accelerated over 100 startup ventures. Sabine is the co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, a top 50 Women in Tech, a FinTech and InsurTech Influencer, an investor & multi-award winner. Twitter LinkedIn Instagram Facebook  TikTok Email Website This Podcast has been brought to you by Disruptive Media. https://disruptivemedia.co.uk/

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• Arvind Sontha How AI Automation Is Transforming Insurance Claims

  On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to Arvind Sontha, COE and co-founder of Kyber, an AI startup redefining how carriers handle claims correspondence. The insurance industry is undergoing a seismic shift as carries face mounting pressure to deliver faster, more transparent, and compliant communications to policy holders and clients, so the need for digital claims transformation has never been greater. KEY TAKEAWAYS If you think about insurance and tailoring insurance, the underlying model for risk is effectively a ‘user personal model’. We started with an obscure line of insurance that didn’t exist yet – or did around personal cyber insurance. We wondered what it would look like, rather than SMB or commercial cyber insurance, as individual underwriting and risk modelling. We got lucky finding a great partner in branch insurance very early on. Over the course of our time engaging with them we ended up turning into an extension of their team. We were able to work closely with them, they trusted us to quickly understand their problems and iterate to give them quick solutions, while at the same time they understood that there are going to be quirks with products that aren’t fully fleshed out which they could iron out over time. It was a symbiotic relationship. If an adjustor has to take an hour to put a document together you have to clear a 1.5-hour space in your calendar to do that. Life is hectic, you have meetings and other tasks to do and so that 1.5-hour block keeps getting moved back, same thing happens to managers. If you can take it from 1.5 hours to 30 seconds for a high-quality letter and a one-click process to approve, you can slip that into any part of your calendar. That’s a really underrated part of the process. Some of the things we want to do in the future is include things like managed parameters. We think it’s obtuse for all the carriers to manage all the fraud language individually all the time, for example. Kyber could manage that for you to make sure everything’s automatically compliant and good to go. Statutory language really enables the full organisation to be prepared to catch each other. BEST MOMENTS ‘Kyber is an AI native, document generation and delivery platform made for claims teams, that’s what we do.’ ‘Nobody doubted that I could build the complex AI to underwrite and quantify the risk, what they needed to figure out was could I sell insurance, which is why I got my broker’s licence!’ ‘The results have been better than I expected, we’ve seen 65% faster drafting times, 80% consolidation of their templates across a 50-state operation, and 5x reduction in letter cycle times for documents.’ ABOUT THE GUESTS Arvind Sontha is co-founder and CEO of Kyber, an AI startup that is redefining how carriers’ NTPAs handle claims correspondence. Arvind is at the forefront of digital transformation, leading Kyber’s mission to automate and streamline the entire lifecycle of claims forms and letters. Kyber’s clients report the impact of AI automation is undeniable: Claims teams using Kyber have reduced letter drafting time by up to 85%, cut review time by 60%, and achieved a 3x faster outreach to policy holders. LinkedIn ABOUT THE HOST Sabine is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur. She is the CEO and Managing Partner of Alchemy Crew a venture lab that accelerates the curation, validation, & commercialization of new tech business models. Sabine is renowned within the insurance sector for building some of the most renowned tech startup accelerators around the world working with over 30 corporate insurers, accelerated over 100 startup ventures. Sabine is the co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, a top 50 Women in Tech, a FinTech and InsurTech Influencer, an investor & multi-award winner. Twitter LinkedIn Instagram Facebook TikTok Email Website This Podcast has been brought to you by Disruptive Media. https://disruptivemedia.co.uk/

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• Charlie Wendland - How AI and Human Empathy Are Transforming the Future of Claims

  On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to Charlie Wendland, chief claims officer at Branch Insurance. The world of claims management is undergoing a seismic shift, with AI at the heart of this transformation. Insurers leveraging AI have reported a 75% reduction in claims handling time and 50% increase in fraud detection accuracy. Cutting claims processing times allows adjustors to focus on complex decisions and customer care. Charlie talks about technology only being part of the story. The future of claims is about continuous transformation, balancing innovation with compliance, and making sure that as we innovate we don’t lose sight of empathy and trust. KEY TAKEAWAYS The combination of investigation, problem solving and, most importantly, being there for people in their worst moments – as a claims adjustor – felt both intellectually engaging and genuinely meaningful. It really drew me to the role. We’re small and can’t afford to build a fully fleshed out claims organisation. So, we made strategic investments to automate those administrative tasks that typically weight down our adjustors and road loos outcomes and also drive expense inefficiencies. We listened to our adjustors; we did a lot of time studies on what’s bogging them down and we proactively sought out those inefficient processes and we looked for technology to improve them. We’ve taken an iterative approach to everything that we’ve built understanding that it’s not going to be perfect when we first launch, but we’re going to be really sensitive to what is not perfect and seek perfection even though we know that’s not possible. BEST MOMENTS ‘Find administrative tasks that weigh down your adjustors, free them of those through technology, and they can spend more time on complex issues and customer care.’ ‘We get adjustor’s opinions on everything that we do, for the most part, which sounds inefficient but it’s really not because we do it in a very thoughtful way.’ ‘70% of our first notice-of-loss now either done electronically or through a voice AI.’ ‘With a startup change is ever present because we’re trying to find a way to do something and we’re able to change quite quickly, but the hurdles are all self-inflicted, so if we’re not communicating effectively that’s on us.’ ABOUT THE GUESTS Charlie Wendland has 20+ years of expertise transforming claims operations across commercial and personal lines. As Chief Claims Officer at Branch, he leads an organisation that's reimagining the insurance experience through technology and customer-centric innovation while delivering optimal claim outcomes. Charlie’s leadership philosophy centres on driving operational efficiency that benefits both customers and the business, building collaborative teams that deliver exceptional results, and pioneering approaches that redefine industry standards. Throughout his career, Charlie has consistently delivered growth while enhancing customer satisfaction. I'm passionate about modernizing insurance and mentoring the next generation of industry leaders. LinkedIn ABOUT THE HOST Sabine is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur. She is the CEO and Managing Partner of Alchemy Crew a venture lab that accelerates the curation, validation, & commercialization of new tech business models. Sabine is renowned within the insurance sector for building some of the most renowned tech startup accelerators around the world working with over 30 corporate insurers, accelerated over 100 startup ventures. Sabine is the co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, a top 50 Women in Tech, a FinTech and InsurTech Influencer, an investor & multi-award winner. Twitter LinkedIn Instagram Facebook  TikTok Email Website

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