Scouting for Growth

In this episode of Scouting for Growth, Sabine VanderLinden welcomes Gil Arazi—a serial entrepreneur, executive, and leading insurtech investor—to explore the urgent transformation taking place in insurance. Gil Arazi argues that the industry’s traditional role of simply paying claims post-loss is outdated and that prevention is the new north star for sustainable growth.

Their conversation dives into why insurance must shift from risk transfer to risk mitigation, what the future holds as data, AI, and even quantum computing disrupt business models, and how prevention can actually drive profit—not just avoid cost. Gil Arazi introduces The Spark, a not-for-profit initiative designed to help insurers decrease systemic risk and increase societal resilience through practical collaboration, not empty innovation theater.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Reflecting on my conversation with Gil Arazi, several themes truly stood out, affirming both the urgency and opportunity for true transformation across insurance. 

First, it’s clear that insurance cannot remain content with its legacy of paying claims post-loss. We are entering an era where prevention, not just remediation, is imperative—technological advancements, from AI to quantum computing, now offer insurers the tools to anticipate and prevent systemic risks, fundamentally altering their value to customers and society. The model must evolve from chasing losses to proactively reducing risk, and this shift is not just about cost efficiency, but empowering profitable growth through enhanced customer retention and relevance.

In building The Spark as a nonprofit prevention lab, Gil Arazi emphasized a collective responsibility: by leveraging data, domain expertise, and increasingly mature technology, we—insurers, partners, and innovators—can bridge the protection gap and act as genuine “protection architects.” This vision requires us to move beyond innovation theater and toward real operational enablement, where execution trumps experimentation.

The challenge, however, is not just technological—it is cultural and emotional. Building trust across competitors demands we fall in love with solving the problem, not just owning the solution. Clear boundaries and shared vulnerabilities create the foundation for meaningful collaboration on the risks no single entity can control alone.

BEST MOMENTS

“The insurance industry needs to move from reacting to the claim ... to proactive prevention of this damage or systemic risk.” 

“The only way insurance can be actually successful and sustainably profitable is by being biased.” 

“Technology will predict risk, but humans will decide what to do with it. Algorithms are very good at probability, but they're terrible at responsibility.” 

“Do something good for humanity and for yourself. If you can't measure your impact by the loss that never happened, you're just optimizing the decline.” 

“The real revolution isn’t technological anymore. It is emotional, it is behavioral, and it is strategic.” 

ABOUT THE GUEST

Gil Arazi is recognized as an insurance industry disruptor and visionary. He’s the founder and managing partner of Fintlv Venture Capital—a top insurtech VC fund with close to $1 billion invested globally—and the founder of The Spark, a purpose-driven, not-for-profit global prevention lab. 

With a career spanning nearly 30 years, including executive leadership, board roles, and serial entrepreneurship in insurance, Gil Arazi has first-hand insight into the industry’s pain points and future opportunities. His work focuses on shifting insurance from loss-payout to loss-prevention, leveraging technology and collaboration to build resilience and drive growth.

ABOUT THE HOST

Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and trust. On Scouting for Growth, she decodes how real growth happens—where capital, collaboration, and courage meet.

If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights.

And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at [email protected]

In this forward-thinking episode, Sabine VanderLinden returns to kick off the year with a transformative discussion on “frontier firms” and the rise of agentic enterprises.

As digital transformation accelerates, leaders face challenges like increasing climate risks, cyber threats, and widening protection gaps—pushing businesses (especially in regulated industries like insurance) to rethink strategies. Sabine explores how trailblazing organizations are leveraging AI not just as an assistant, but as an autonomous driver of capacity and productivity. 

Through practical frameworks and real-world case studies, this episode lays out the playbook for riding the next wave of innovation, resilience, and growth.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

This year on Scouting for Growth, I wanted to regroup and make sure my podcast continues to deliver what matters most to you in the fast-paced transformation market. After a brief pause and reflection, and evaluating the insights from the World Economic Forum, with a clear sense that the world feels increasingly uninsurable—climate risk, cyber threats, and protection gaps are all expanding. But I believe that this narrative of uninsurability is simply a choice, not a certainty.

I see a new class of leaders emerging, those who aren’t just trying to manage risk but who are fundamentally changing how we approach it. Transformation isn’t just happening in isolated labs; it's exploding at the convergence of capital, technology, and strategy—the true frontier of business. This is where agentic enterprises are emerging, blending human leadership with AI agents, forming digital workforces where competitive advantage depends on our agility with data, not just data ownership.

Examples abound: Telstra is scaling AI across thousands of employees, UBS has put AI at the heart of its business via a Chief AI Officer, Mercedes-Benz uses digital twins and multiple agent systems to optimize production, and at Nestlé, AI is transforming everything from farm to fork. These companies aren’t dabbling—they’re fundamentally rethinking their models and leadership.

My message is simple: the agentic frontier is not some distant theory—it’s here and now. The uninsurable world is a choice, and you can choose to lead in this new paradigm. The tools and models exist, and the only question left is who has the courage to execute. As you listen and engage this year, I’ll keep guiding you through these themes—helping you build, not just watch, the future unfold.

BEST MOMENTS

"The uninsurable world is a choice, not a certainty. While some twist their hands over these challenges, a new class of leaders is rewriting the rules of the game."

"A frontier firm in the simplest terms is an organization that is human led but agent operated. This means your people set the vision and define success, while AI agents handle a significant share of the execution, working autonomously with oversight across processes."

"Mastering [these levers] is the difference between watching the future happen and actively building it."

"The market is sending an unequivocal message: the future of financial institutions including insurance, all regulated industry belongs to the agentic enterprise. This is not a distant vision; it is happening right now."

ABOUT THE HOST

Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and trust. On Scouting for Growth, she decodes how real growth happens—where capital, collaboration, and courage meet.

If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights.

And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at [email protected]

On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to Sangha Penesetti, founder and CEO of goZeal, who didn’t just break the glass ceiling—she installed a flexible skylight.

Today we’ll dive into the economics of equity, why flexible work is not a perk but a performance driver, and how insurers can win by rethinking who gets a seat at the table—and how that table is set.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

In my early career, every client meeting I walked into was a room full of men. I was the only woman of colour. When I became a mother in 2010 I felt first-hang how unforgiving the industry was, there was no real flexibility, no empathy around new mums (though that may have just been the company I worked for then), and certainly no system that was designed for working mums.

During Covid I found my own community: Brilliant, highly educated women, especially Indian and Asian mums, step out of the workforce to raise kids and never return. Not because they lacked ambition, but because the system simply wasn’t build for them. That’s the moment I realised it wasn’t an individual struggle but a systemic design flaw, that’s when goZeal was born.

We talk about empowerment a lot, but what is empowerment? It‘s the financial empowerment, the capacity for women to have the money to spend on whatever they want be that a Gucci bag or feeding their kids. The data is clear: When women (and especially women of colour) advance, companies become more innovative and perform better financially. 

BEST MOMENTS 

‘My experience taught me that being included isn’t the same as being empowered.’ 

‘Radical inclusion flips the dynamic. It’s not about representation, it’s about access to meaningful work decision-making authority and economic mobility.’

‘Remote work is not “flexibility.” Flexibility means flexibility of time. I wanted to hire women directly to give them the autonomy of time. Direct impact comes when you are the employer.’

‘True flexibility allows for peak productivity not proximity. When people work at their best insurers benefit from higher quality work, lower burnout, less attrition, stronger retention, all of that good stuff.’

ABOUT THE GUEST

Sangha Penesetti is the powerhouse founder and CEO of goZeal, a company rewriting the rules of work by directly hiring skilled women, especially women of colour, for high-impact, flexible roles in insurance and tech. With 18 years of experience in finance and insurance, she’s lived the challenges of being the only woman at the table—and decided to build her own.

Under her leadership, goZeal is more than a talent platform—it’s a movement. One that’s tackling systemic inequity, modernizing legacy operations, and showing insurers that flexible work is not a perk but a strategic edge.

She’s here to talk about the real economics of inclusion, why hybrid isn’t enough, and how insurers can close talent gaps while building a future-ready workforce.

ABOUT THE HOST

Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and trust. On Scouting for Growth, she decodes how real growth happens—where capital, collaboration, and courage meet.

If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights.

And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at [email protected]

On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to Marinela Profi, Global Market Strategy Lead for AI, GenAI and Agentic AI at SAS, about the rise of agentic AI and how we will move from hype to real, reliable AI.

In today’s episode, we’ll discuss: Why LLMs alone don’t solve business problems – and what does, how governance is becoming the new frontier of AI trust, and what leaders should expect by 2026, as enterprises shift from experiments to autonomous, explainable intelligence.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

A generative AI chatbot is really good and answering questions, generating text, or summarising content. But, it typically stops when it comes to conversation. On the other hand, an AI agent goes beyond that, it can take action, it has goals, memory, reasoning capabilities and can orchestrate multi-set workflows using a combination of not just large-language models but also rules, data and analytics. Generative AI talks, and agentic AI does.

The 5-step lifecycle of an agent is a framework I put together to help me and my customers understand what an agent actually does step-by-step in practice. 1. Perception 2. Cognition 3. Decisioning 4. Action, and 5. Learning.

Governance boards in 2026 will act more like digital oversight committees, they will ensure that agents aren’t just smart, but they are safe, explainable and accountable. 

BEST MOMENTS 

‘Post action the agent learns from feedback from a human operative. It’s important to monitor the learning loops, you cannot allow the agent to “self-update” in ways that are uncontrolled.’ 

‘How autonomous should an agent be? 90% of the time it depends on the risk and impact of the task.’

‘Autonomy without accountability is a risk multiplier.’

‘Governance doesn’t stop at deployment, performance must be continuously monitored.’

ABOUT THE GUEST

Marinela Profi helps organizations move from AI hype to trusted impact. As Global Market Strategy Lead for AI, GenAI, and Agentic AI at SAS, she works with enterprises in financial services, healthcare, and government to build AI systems that don’t just act fast—but act responsibly.

With an MBA and a Master’s in Statistics and AI, Marinela bridges two worlds: translating complex data science into clear business strategy. Her work focuses on how agentic AI—intelligent systems that perceive, reason, and act autonomously—can deliver governed, explainable decisions instead of black-box predictions.

A frequent keynote speaker at international AI and analytics events, she shares insights on the evolution from generative to agentic AI and the new frontier of AI governance, trust, and human-AI collaboration. Marinela is also an Advisory Board Member for Wake Technical Community College’s Data Science Program, helping shape future-ready curricula that connect classroom learning with real-world AI innovation.

ABOUT THE HOST

Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and trust. On Scouting for Growth, she decodes how real growth happens—where capital, collaboration, and courage meet.

If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights.

And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at [email protected]

On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to Andrei Craciunescu, founder and CEO of RiskCube, about why the next generation of insurance will be built like software: adaptive, transparent, and embedded into every business platform.

They also discuss how AI and data are transforming the broker's role from middleman to intelligent orchestrator, and what the insurance experience of 2030 could look like when protection becomes invisible and trust becomes the new currency.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

What companies want from the insurance market is fast underwriting, not to talk with humans so much anymore, especially startups; they want a quote in minutes, not months. This is how we got into the segment where we offer business insurance for startups – mainly venture-backed startups.

Some providers already offer what we are doing, but there is no comparison. Every founder needs to go to each insurance company separately and ask for a quote, which often varies a lot – sometimes by 40%. They spend a lot of time investigating these quotes, which is expensive and hard to understand. RiskCube is an AI insurance agency for startups where founders can buy and manage insurance online.

We looked at what an agency traditionally does: it has different processes in place, such as insurance applications, renewals, cancellations, and claims. We tried to map out all these processes to see which can be done by AI agents. AI cannot solve the whole insurance value chain, but we see a huge adoption in the claims and applications processes.

Generally, most founders don’t really care which insurance company they’re with; they care that they have somebody who really understands them as a customer. We want startups to come to us because they trust the system, which provides a fast experience that works for them. It’s not very complicated, what we do for them at the beginning, we provide a smooth process where we can say they have high, medium or low risk then evaluate different quotes for them.

BEST MOMENTS 

‘Everybody’s pushing on the AI front, but the insurance market is also evaluating if it’s really necessary; it’s not all in, which is impressive.’ 

‘We build the firm first and then embed the technology inside the firm. This will make us defensible in the future because we will own the data in our agency and use it to train our own model.’

‘People are using a lot of AI nowadays, but nobody really understands where the data is going or hosted.’

‘Insurance companies tend to adapt AI for themselves, not for the whole market. We want to bring them all together in one channel.’

ABOUT THE GUEST

Andrei Craciunescu is redefining risk management with RiskCube, an AI-powered platform revolutionising insurance by streamlining risk assessments, accelerating quote processes, and providing real-time insights to help businesses secure coverage faster and smarter.

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ABOUT THE HOST

Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and trust. On Scouting for Growth, she decodes how real growth happens—where capital, collaboration, and courage meet.

If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights.

And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at [email protected]