Sixfold Resources

I’m beyond excited to announce that Sixfold has been officially selected to take part in the 12th cohort of Lloyd’s InsurTech accelerator program, Lloyd’s Lab. 

Lloyd’s Lab was recently recognized as a top-25 European start-up hub by the Financial Times and Statista and ranked the very top insurance-focused accelerator out of 19 countries and +2,000 organizations.

The program will give our team the opportunity to collaborate with Lloyd’s mentors to develop innovative solutions for the world’s leading insurance and reinsurance marketplace. Over the course of the 10-week “fast-track, fast fail” program kicking off in late April, our team will build, test, and iterate innovative solutions that “challenge how we do things and help the Lloyd’s market better serve its customers.”

Sixfold was one of just 22 insurtechs invited to travel to London to take part in Lloyd’s “Pitch Day” event. This year saw the largest-ever application pool for the program—Pitch Day invitees had to be culled down from more than 250 applications submitted by insurtechs spanning 33 different counties. 

For our pitch, I showcased how much we have built to serve underwriters in the past 10 months to 1,000-plus virtual and in-person attendees from across the Lloyd’s market ecosystem. We were selected into the program as one of only 12 teams by a panel of market leaders, mentors, and the Lab team, and we were the only underwriting solution to be accepted into the program! 

Members of Sixfold’s product and design teams will spend 10 weeks working out of the iconic Lloyd’s building in London. We will focus our efforts on accelerating and optimizing triage and risk appetite match capabilities within the scale of Lloyd’s markets. 

We’ll demo the fruits of our accelerator labor to the entire Lloyd’s market in early July—stay tuned for details!

Lloyd’s Lab unique approach to fostering global innovation is helping to tackle some of the world’s biggest insurance challenges. Progressing the Lab’s mission of supporting innovative insurance solutions across the globe, this latest cohort focuses on developing solutions to some of the biggest risks faced by businesses and communities in the Americas such as challenges arising from natural hazard prediction to risks associated with cybersecurity.

Thank you to Lloyd’s for believing in our vision and helping us bring it to fruition. We can’t wait to show the entire Lloyd’s market—and the rest of the world—what we have in store.

This article was originally posted on Linkedin

Working in enterprise tech - an industry that has notoriously struggled to stay on the cutting edge - I never needed much convincing that AI would one day unlock massive opportunity. While we are nowhere close to meaningful adoption of AI, that’s where we’re headed.

The first wave of generative AI has been horizontal with the release of GPT-4, Anthropic, Bard, and others. But the next wave will be vertical, marrying the summarization and reasoning superpowers of the LLMs with specially-trained models and industry expertise.

This is why today, I’m excited to announce the launch of Sixfold, the first generative artificial intelligence trained to solve the hardest problems in the insurance industry.

With $6.5 million in seed backing from Bessemer Venture Partners and Crystal Venture Partners, and leadership with decades of insurance experience, Sixfold is poised to rapidly transform how the insurance industry thinks about and uses AI.

To start, Sixfold Gen AI will focus on one of the most intractable challenges in insurance: the inefficiency of underwriting.

Underwriting is an art form, requiring human-level pattern recognition to capture all of the things that go into understanding a complex risk. For years, insurers have struggled to extract clear rules and standards for assessing risk because there has simply been too much information. Insurance carriers have a “front-door problem”: because of how manual and time-intensive the underwriting process is, insurers can’t provide quotes on all of the opportunities that come their way.

A smart underwriting platform like you’ve never seen before.

Prior attempts at AI in insurance haven’t gained much traction because they took a “black box” approach and thought they knew better than the underwriters. These failed attempts need way too much data and haven’t produced consistent results. Instead, we’ve trained generative AI models to "understand" all of this information and assist humans with the manual assessment. With the Sixfold Assistant, underwriters will be able to quickly evaluate and rate all submissions, thus improving underwriters’ capacity as well as the accuracy and traceability of their decisions.

Today, the Sixfold Assistant is best positioned to eliminate a lot of the “grunt work” that underwriters deal with on a daily basis: tracking down information from third parties, poring through thousands of pages of documents, and making sense of unstructured data. Sixfold will serve as a co-pilot to underwriters, plugging into existing technology so insurers don’t need to overhaul legacy systems in order to take advantage of Sixfold’s capabilities.

We’re thrilled to be launching with our customer BTIS, the commercial insurance provider focused on the construction and building trades industry. Sixfold will be an important tool for BTIS underwriters to improve the speed and accuracy of their underwriting efforts. Sixfold will ultimately make BTIS more competitive by allowing its underwriters to spend less time poring over data and more time issuing policies to its customers.

Sixfold is partnering at launch with BuildZoom, the leading provider of contractor profile data, property building permit data and contractor sourcing services. Sixfold will also expand its partner ecosystem to include consulting and advisory firms, cloud providers, risk and prior loss providers and medical records providers.

Sixfold’s initial focus will be on the commercial property & casualty and life insurance sectors, with plans to expand across the entire insurance industry, going after the over $100 billion spent annually in the US to underwrite insurance.

I’m particularly excited to launch Sixfold because of who I’m doing it with.

Our founding team is made up of former founders and operators, with deep experience in highly-regulated industries, including decades in insurance. Jane Tran is our COO and co-founder. Jane and I spent years working together as founding team members at Unqork, the $2 billion enterprise no-code platform. Our CTO and co-founder Brian Moseley, joins us from American Express where he was Head of Developer Experience.

A huge thanks to Charles Birnbaum and Jeremy Levine at Bassemer Venture Partners, and Jonathan Crystal and Stephen McGovern at Crystal Venture Partners for supporting us in this journey, to our ambitious customers, and to our partners.

Let’s rewrite the rules of insurance together!

This announcement was originally posted on LinkedIn

Today, life & disability carriers have access to more data from more data sources than ever, but the processing of all that data has paradoxically decreased efficiency and limited underwriting capacity. The industry has wisely turned to gen AI to help it reap the rewards of the modern data abundance while minimizing the cost.

In our view, gen-AI-powered underwriting isn’t about conversing with chatbots, it’s about collaborating with a platform that understands exactly what you need and exactly how to get it. But how should a platform like that function? What would it even look like? We started the process of answering those questions by interviewing dozens of underwriters to understand their frustrations, goals, and how other tools have failed them in the past. This input has guided our approach to design built around simplicity, context, trust, and fun. 

Simplicity

Many L&D carriers rely on automated extraction tools and/or offshore teams for their data-processing needs. These result in long multi-page reports, which are typically just ordered lists of data. Underwriters are left to rifle through these tomes to pull out relevant info. Sixfold eliminates these overly manual tasks by injecting AI throughout the underwriting process.

We use cutting-edge AI to independently build a virtual model of carriers’ unique risk appetites, so the platform can understand what constitutes negative or positive risk signals for that carrier. The platform taps a different set of purpose-built AI models to process ingested data and gracefully surface precisely what information underwriters need — and nothing else.

How does this AI wonder translate into design? We’ve leaned hard into “inconspicuously helpful.” The best AI is one that doesn’t make a show of itself, but can be depended upon to solve problems when called into action. More old-school British butler, and less Robin Williams’ genie from Aladdin. From a design perspective, that means elevating minimalism and simplicity.

Underwriters never see the AI hard at work ingesting data from disparate sources (APS files, MIB reports, labs, etc.). And they shouldn’t have to. All they want to see are easily scannable bits of appetite-aligned information in a unified dashboard experience. Leave the sausage-making to us, enjoy your hotdog.

This effortless minimalism extends to every part of the platform. On the case list page, underwriters can peruse a list of applicants with clear visual cues signifying which cases are closely aligned with underwriting criteria and which aren’t. In a previous technological era, underwriters had to invest time in scrutinizing each and every applicant with limited ability to triage, leading to reduced productivity. With Sixfold, they can focus their efforts on the biggest impact.

Context

Traditional data processing & ingestion treats all information equally. Taking a daily multivitamin is, for example, given with the same “weight” as immunosuppressants taken after an organ transplant. “Flattened” data reports, no matter how thorough, require underwriter intermediation to pick out the relevant through lines. 

We can do better in 2024.

Sixfold taps a medley of nine AI models to identify relevant data points from disparate sources and “connect the dots” between them. It’s the difference between, say, mentioning an applicant has diabetes versus summarizing how it’s being managed, e.g., “applicant was diagnosed with diabetes in 2015, but it is being adequately managed through diet and insulin.”

We haven’t merely replaced one form of summarization with an AI-powered one. We use gen AI prudently and solely in service of accelerating decision-making. Our goal is to present underwriters with as little information as possible (or, rather, just the right information) so they can focus their energies on making informed decisions. 

Concise auto-generated explanations are placed front and center, but underwriters can always dive deeper into specific information as needed (e.g., the platform may let you know that recent cholesterol readings were acceptable, but you have the option to dive into the readings from the last few labs).

‍Trust

The best underwriters are detail-oriented, and they deserve tools that meet (or better yet, exceed) their standards of thoroughness. Underwriters using Sixfold should be confident that everything has been scrutinized as thoroughly as if they did it themselves—if not more!

We accomplish this by showing our work. Transparency is baked into the Sixfold UX. We provide sourcing of all surfaced risk factors and conclusions, right down to the source and page so underwriters know precisely where a conclusion came from, and why it was arrived at.

And a little bit of fun

We want engagements with our platform to feel like working with your favorite coworker. You know the one we’re talking about right? The one that gets things done, but throws in a little light-hearted banter and joking around to improve your day just a bit.

Going through medical records isn’t what most people consider enjoyable. So we injected some moments of surprise and delight that can bring the joy back to underwriting. Our platform includes small flourishes that we hope provide a little levity.

Throughout the site, we’ve included illustrations of friendly robots collaborating with humans and empowering the humans to do more. The overriding theme of this aesthetic? Clay. Why clay? It feels deeply human, handmade with little imperfections that add character. We believe that AI can liberate humans from rote work (which is better handled by machines anyway) so they can emphasize their uniquely human qualities. The machines aren’t going to take over our jobs – they’re going to free us to bring humanity back to the work we do.

Want to see the platform in action? Watch our on-demand product demo for a live walkthrough of Sixfold’s Life & Disability offerings.