Hudson Structured, Nephila invest in AI property data insurtech Tensorflight

Tensorflight, an artificial intelligence insurtech start-up that offers property data to help insurance and reinsurance firms better understand their exposures has closed a $2 million funding round with support from ILS managers Hudson Structured Capital Management and Nephila Capital.

The $2 million investment round was led by venture specialists ff Venture Capital, Hudson Structured Capital Management, Nephila, Hemi Ventures, with other investors also participating.

Tensorflight takes geospatial imagery, building records, and uses machine learning algorithms to provide outputs that can help property underwriters better assess risks and understand exposures in their portfolios of risk.

Run by former Google and Microsoft engineers, Tensorflight has secured the backing of key strategic investors in the insurance industry, including now insurance-linked investment specialists Hudson Structured and Nephila Capital.

Nephila has had a relationship with Tensorflight since late 2018, we understand, with an observer seat on the start-ups board.

Tensorflight says that its technology can automatically assess property attributes, such as building footprints, construction type, roof pitch and geometry, number of stories, and more, to provide feedback to inform the underwriting process of property risk portfolios.

“We are excited about continuing our journey of automating commercial property insurance,” explained Robert Kozikowski, who co-founded the company along with Zbigniew Wojna. “We will use the additional funding to expand the team with a head of sales in New York or New Jersey and engineering in Warsaw or New York.”

Adam Plotkin, Partner at ff Venture Capital, added “Tensorflight is a perfect illustration of our strategy to invest in companies that apply cutting-edge AI and machine learning models to solve specific, valuable problems in industry verticals. They have designed and produced a solution that will significantly improve the speed and accuracy of property assessment for real-time pricing and underwriting for commercial property insurance.”

Commercial property insurers often lack key information on individual properties, and gaining access to this detailed information can be prohibitively time-consuming and expensive. Tensorflight’s risk assessment platform gets this data from satellite images in a matter of minutes, enabling underwriters to provide quotes based on much richer information and data.

For reinsurance partners, knowing property underwriters are writing business informed with the best possible exposure and building level data can provide greater confidence and result in better execution of transactions.

Vikas Singhal, Partner and CIO of Hudson Structured’s InsurTech investment strategy, commented on the strength of Tensorflight’s team saying, “Robert and Zbigniew have assembled a team of world-class computer vision experts, who are uniquely positioned to tackle these challenges for commercial property insurers. We’re incredibly excited to see their business grow for years to come.”

For ILS funds that might like to move along the value-chain, such as Nephila has done with its MGA and other activities, this data can also prove useful in improving underwriting processes and the overall quality of portfolios as well.

As we also explained today, Hudson Structured has invested in an auto insurtech called Noblr.

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