InsTech - insurance & innovation
00:03:23 · Matthew Grant, Richard Gunn
[00:03:23] S1: It's a lot of change, as you said, seven years, and we'll talk a little bit about your own personal experience, but you're heading up the US operation out there now. I think last time we spoke, you had 20 people out there in The US on the ground. Obviously, a big market for you. [00:03:35] S2: Yeah. That's right. So I moved over here a year ago and started building out a US team. Two of the hardest things to get right when you expand into a new geography. One is to get the culture right, and two is to win your first customer. Immersively, we had a little bit of an unfair advantage on winning your first customer because we were able to sell to some large US carriers from The UK, particularly through COVID, kind of decreased the geographical kind of barrier there. And I moved over to start building out a US pod, start building out a US team. And, yeah, over the last twelve months, I've scaled up to about 20 people. They are continuing to hire, which is exciting and exhausting. But, yeah, I'm based over here, based down in Brooklyn and New York. [00:04:15] S1: We'll come back to the experience of moving to The US and compare and contrast to The UK. But we should just baseline it. Hyperexponential HX was initially known as a pricing platform. I know you've expanded a bit since then, so how do you describe yourself in terms of what problem are you solving for your clients today?
00:04:15 · Matthew Grant, Richard Gunn
[00:04:15] S1: We'll come back to the experience of moving to The US and compare and contrast to The UK. But we should just baseline it. Hyperexponential HX was initially known as a pricing platform. I know you've expanded a bit since then, so how do you describe yourself in terms of what problem are you solving for your clients today? [00:04:32] S2: Yeah, sure. So, you're right. We are kind of most commonly known for our pricing and rating capabilities. Our mission has always remained consistent over the last eight years. Lots of things have changed, but our mission hasn't, which is to build the decision infrastructure for the insurance ecosystem. And that started with majoring on pricing and rating. In terms of the problems that we look to solve for and kind of broaden our aperture of how we try and help insurers now, it's really around winning the right risks, making better pricing decisions, and then maximizing portfolio profit, So everywhere from ingestion through to quote and then subsequent kind of portfolio optimization. So that's seen our product capabilities, even over the last twelve months alone, evolve from just the pricing and rating capability that many of our customers know us for towards having triage as well as portfolio intelligence capabilities on the on the kind of the back end of that decision making process, as well as releasing a whole host of AI capabilities and AI agents to come sit on top of that decision infrastructure.
00:04:32 · Richard Gunn, Matthew Grant
[00:04:32] S2: Yeah, sure. So, you're right. We are kind of most commonly known for our pricing and rating capabilities. Our mission has always remained consistent over the last eight years. Lots of things have changed, but our mission hasn't, which is to build the decision infrastructure for the insurance ecosystem. And that started with majoring on pricing and rating. In terms of the problems that we look to solve for and kind of broaden our aperture of how we try and help insurers now, it's really around winning the right risks, making better pricing decisions, and then maximizing portfolio profit, So everywhere from ingestion through to quote and then subsequent kind of portfolio optimization. So that's seen our product capabilities, even over the last twelve months alone, evolve from just the pricing and rating capability that many of our customers know us for towards having triage as well as portfolio intelligence capabilities on the on the kind of the back end of that decision making process, as well as releasing a whole host of AI capabilities and AI agents to come sit on top of that decision infrastructure. [00:05:30] S1: How do people buy from you? Is it still the pricing platform? You have to buy the pricing platform and they buy the add ons, or are the add ons something people can get in their own right?
00:05:30 · Matthew Grant, Richard Gunn
[00:05:30] S1: How do people buy from you? Is it still the pricing platform? You have to buy the pricing platform and they buy the add ons, or are the add ons something people can get in their own right? [00:05:38] S2: It will depend on what their current pain points are. We might have clients who initially want to solve some of their ingestion and triage or are more focused just on the pricing. One of our kind of key differentiators is the fact that we can surface up some of that pricing and rating logic at the point of triage. So typically, we do have early conversations around how that can sit at the center of your ecosystem. Ultimately, we'll work with customers and understand what their priorities are focus on that. [00:06:01] S1: There's so many choices now for companies who they can work with. I mean, also choices about do they go with organizations like yourself now semi established, meaning you've out there for seven, eight years testing it out, there's some people now coming in, good understanding of generative AI, agentic AI, but don't really understand insurance, they can build it themselves. My sense is you sort of fit in the middle there somewhere, which is you've got a track record, you can help people grow, but they're not risking it by starting off with some very smart people that haven't really got understanding of insurance. You've got some smart people and you've built a business now, and now you're responding to the needs to sort of grow beyond that original core functionality just up and down the work stream. Is that a fair way of characterizing it?
00:06:44 · Richard Gunn
[00:06:44] S2: Yeah. I would... A key way that we've differed to other solutions in the market right from day dot is we refer to ourselves sometimes as a pro code platform. So you can log on to our platform, and you can operate in an IDE or development environment where you can actually code and build your own triage, pricing, rating, or portfolio intelligence tools. And therefore, we try to position ourselves as kind of the the best of both in terms of build vBuy to that point there, because you have the flexibility that the specialty and large commercial market demands in terms of being able to engineer for your own edge cases as a specific insurer, reinsurer, or MGA, but then you have that kind of enterprise credibility and confidence from sitting on a platform which has been tried and tested. We have, I think, 60 different clients now collectively writing over $50,000,000,000 of premium on our platform, so there's lots of kind of performance edge cases that have been uncovered and had to be fixed in the meantime, we can give customers that confidence around the enterprise grade engineering, but they can still build their own capabilities on top of it.
00:07:45 · Matthew Grant, Richard Gunn
[00:07:45] S1: 60 clients is actually really impressive. Mean, a lot of companies get stuck, for those that are familiar with the technology adoption curve, or Geoffrey Moore's point about crossing the chasm, where you can be ready for early adopters, but the early majority don't really wanna take the risk. I mean, you're definitely now into mainstream with 60 companies. What's the balance between those that are in The UK where you started off versus in The US? [00:08:06] S2: Yeah, good question. Our largest customer base is already in The US, so about 40% of the premium that's priced on our platform each year is US premium, and that's kind of reflected in how many customers we have in The US as well. That's in part because we were able to sell into The US from The UK very effectively, but also reflects just how much premium there is in in The US market. So when you sell to some of the clients that we can name, likes of Sompo, Unicry, Markel, all US carriers, or recently sold to Bowhead, for example, started partnering with them. Just allows you just to build a lot of traction very quickly. [00:08:39] S1: Some great names. I'm guessing coming originally out of The UK and specifically the under market, where there's a whole different range of lines of business being written that you've either had to or you've been sort of chosen to be very flexible about what lines of business can be run through the tool.