Sixfold Content

Just 12 months ago, we introduced Sixfold and its vision to the world. Today, we’re thrilled to announce a $15 million Series A investment led by Salesforce Ventures with participation from Scale Venture Partners and our initial seed investors Bessemer Venture Partners and Crystal Venture Partners.

With these additional resources, Sixfold will expand our already exceptional team of engineers to further enhance our products and accelerate our R&D efforts. On the business & operations side, we will broaden our offerings and grow our footprint beyond North America to the United Kingdom and European Union. 

Most importantly, this new capital injection will advance our mission to overcome today’s most pressing underwriting challenges, not by iteration, but by building a new end-to-end risk analysis paradigm. That’s a big statement, I know. But we didn’t pick the name “Sixfold” out of modesty.

Year one of building insurance’s most consequential tech

In our inaugural blog post, I pledged that Sixfold would “focus on one of the most intractable challenges in insurance: the inefficiency of underwriting” and our team has backed up this promise with a year’s worth of accomplishments. 

We’ve developed a patent-pending AI that rapidly translates carriers’ unique underwriting guidelines into digital risk models, regardless of what form those guidelines take. This is Sixfold’s superpower, but far from our only bit of AI magic.

Leveraging 10 proprietary models, our platform surfaces appetite-aligned risk signals from disparate sources and independently “connects the dots” to generate natural language summarizations and recommendations. All our hard engineering work has resulted in unquestionable business value. In just one year, Sixfold has boosted underwriting capacity for our customers by a factor of 10, accelerated data collection by 2,000x, sliced submission-to-quote cycles from hours (sometimes weeks) to mere minutes, and pushed our platform accuracy to an industry-leading 94% so our customers can precisely assign NAICS/SIC codes at scale.

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Sixfold is uniquely posed for continued growth with top-tier global partners in the year to come. We were named a winner of The 2024 Zurich Innovation Championship, the industry’s largest open innovation contest. As one of only 9 winners selected from more than 3,000 global applicants, our team will participate in the Championship’s elite accelerator program to develop a new commercial underwriting solution.

Our Innovation Championship win was a powerful validation of Sixfold’s approach from a storied industry leader, and it wasn’t even the only one in 2024—in March, Sixfold was selected for the exclusive Lloyd’s Lab accelerator program (out of their largest-ever pool of applicants). Our team is currently working with Lloyd’s to develop innovative solutions for the world’s leading insurance and reinsurance marketplace, which will be invaluable as Sixfold expands into the UK and beyond.

Writing the next chapter in underwriting

Over the past year, we’ve grown from a team of three to a staff of 18, with more additions to come. In the near term, we’re focused on bringing on seasoned tech leaders to guide our continued success, as exemplified by the recent addition of Ian P. Cook, PhD, Sixfold’s first full-time head of AI. By adding select talent to our elite team, there’s no underwriting challenge we won’t overcome. 

I’m ridiculously proud of what this team has accomplished and excited about everything we will accomplish utilizing this latest fund round as a jumping-off point. 

I want to thank Laura Rowson, Nowi Kallen, and the rest of the Salesforce Ventures team for seeing the unique potential of our vision, or as Laura generously put it in our press release, for seeing Sixfold “as a company capable of transforming the insurance industry.” We’re beyond excited to work with Salesforce Ventures to accelerate our growth and materialize those changes.

And, of course, a huge thank you to Alex Niehenke at Scale Venture Partners and for continued support from our initial backers Charles Birnbaum & Jeremy Levine at Bessemer Venture Partners and Jonathan Crystal & Stephen McGovern at Crystal Venture Partners. 

If you haven’t yet had a chance to see what our platform can accomplish, there’s no better time to get started. Reach out for a personalized demo. We can’t wait to show you the future of underwriting.

This article was originally posted on LinkedIn

I’m thrilled to announce that Sixfold has been named a winner of this year’s Zurich Innovation Championship! Since 2018, Zurich Insurance Group has overseen an annual “collaboration program” with select startups from around the world to develop new offers and services for their customers. The yearly Championship has rapidly expanded to become the industry’s largest open innovation contest with thousands of applicants from over 30 countries resulting in more than 50 active initiatives implemented through Zurich Insurance’s global business. 

‍Celebrated for Pioneering Innovation

Sixfold was only one of nine teams selected out of a pool of more than 3,000 global applicants to take part in the accelerator portion of the Championship. Our team will take on the “Commercial Insurance” challenge to engineer technical solutions that “improve transparency and accountability, enhance risk management capabilities, and foster sustainability transition through a culture of trust and innovation.”

For the next four months, our team will collaborate with leaders from Zurich North America (ZNA) to build AI-powered risk analysis & summarization solutions to augment underwriter workflows through the automation of high-volume (but not necessarily high-value) tasks.

Improving Insurance Efficiencies

Unlike traditional accelerator programs, which focus on product development, the Innovation Championship aims to accelerate the adoption of a new solution within Zurich Insurance’s global business. We’re thankful to the leadership at Zurich Insurance for believing in Sixfold’s mission and our team, and we look forward to building an amazing solution that results in improved efficiencies that benefit Zurich’s customers, insurance brokers, and other stakeholders. 

This collaboration comes only two months after Sixfold’s selection to participate in the 12th cohort of Lloyd’s exclusive accelerator program, Lloyd’s Labs, which kicked off in April and we will be demoing in July. 

We’ve only just begun Sixfold’s second year — and it’s turning out to be a BIG one!

This article was originally posted on Linkedin

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

This time last year, Sixfold was little more than a name and a vague concept. But since officially launching in May, this remarkable team (now 17-strong and growing!) has revolutionized insurance underwriting. That’s a bold statement from a biased observer, but I think I can back it up. 

First, let’s briefly explore the state of affairs coming into 2023.

Modern carriers process vast amounts of data from a wide array of sources to inform underwriting decisions. Today’s competitive advantages are secured—or lost—based on the efficiency and accuracy with which one handles this data. 

Over the years, multiple data-tech vendors have promised to help carriers keep pace, but they haven’t been even close to sufficient. Meanwhile, data ecosystems have grown more expansive and the tools gap, more glaring.

At Sixfold, we saw this challenge compounding by the day—not for lack of trying, but for lack of imagination. It’s what inspired us to develop a new approach that prioritizes transformation over iteration.

Our platform was uniquely built to accelerate the bewilderingly complex process of modeling risk appetite, no matter the starting point. Is your risk tolerance detailed in a loose assortment of PDFs? An Excel document? Or just a bundle of past submissions? We can make sense of it all. And that’s just the start. Our proprietary generative AI engine ingests applicant data from disparate sources at scale and—unlike traditional “intelligent” data processing tools, which merely extract data—generates clear summaries, fully aligned with carriers’ appetites, empowering underwriters to move with unprecedented accuracy and speed.

And it’s been effective. Ridiculously effective. Let’s run through a few quick examples:

✅ A leading general liability carrier was averaging 4 hours for its submission-to-quote cycles, but once they implemented Sixfold, that time was slashed to just 4 minutes.

✅ Last year, a large global cyber carrier measured its submission-to-quote cycles in weeks; now they do it in 3 minutes and 24 seconds.

✅ Before adding Sixfold to its tech stack, a major life & health carrier needed days to extract, surface, and package relevant data from multiple sources for a single life insurance application. Now the entire process is handled automatically in a fraction of the time.

Perhaps you can see where the industry is headed and why this is the area where Sixfold is focusing.

The journey from there to here

The progress our engineering team has made over this not-even-a-full year has been nothing short of astonishing. Gen AI is moving forward at warp speed–and Sixfold is moving even faster. 

In just the past few months we’ve transitioned from relying on a single LLM vendor to tapping and training a plethora of platforms based on their unique abilities. Additionally, we’ve tailor-built our own proprietary AI models to increase speed, accuracy, and privacy—we’ll be tripling down on our internal R&D efforts in the years ahead. (As a side note: I can’t wait to show you what our engineers have been working on…more on that during our January webinar.)

The only thing evolving faster than AI technology is society’s views of it. More people are voicing concerns about the potential negative impact of AI, particularly around issues of scaled bias. We get it. We have a shared interest in ensuring that AI is deployed with a human-first approach. 

Sixfold has been proactively and uniquely engaged in the conversation. I, and other Sixfold leaders, have repeatedly met with the state regulators and commissioners throughout the year to better understand their concerns and thinking. These meetings have helped us design our platform in anticipation of new regulations and, conversely, offer our unique insights to influence the formation of emerging rules that will allow AI to work better for everyone.

Hello, 2024

We’re exclusively obsessed with insurance underwriting. We have been from the beginning and we will continue to be in the future.

I’m beyond proud of what this team has accomplished over the past 7 months, and I can’t wait to share with you what’s in store in 2024. Join us this coming January for our first-ever virtual session, Boost Underwriting Capacity in 2024: Discover the Sixfold Impact, for a demo of how our platform enhances underwriting capacity in P&C, Life, and Specialty insurance sectors.

None of this would have been possible without the support and backing of Charles Birnbaum and Jeremy Levine at Bessemer Venture Partners, and Jonathan Crystal and Stephen McGovern at Crystal Venture Partners. We’re grateful for our bold customers and partners who understood our vision and joined us on the first leg of our journey. And of course, I can’t say enough about the Sixfold team including my co-founders Jane and Brian as well as our growing lineup of researchers, innovators, and visionaries: Brooke, Drew, Emil, Gregg, Ian, Lana, Laurence, Leonardo, Lucas, Maja, Marie, Omeed, Stewart, and Ryan.

Don’t miss our 2023 recap. See you all next year!

This post was originally published on LinkedIn.

Insurance underwriting isn’t for the weak. It’s a dizzyingly complex undertaking that requires connecting data points across disparate sources to support consequential decisions—all while meeting modern expectations for speed, accuracy, and compliance. 

The role has grown exponentially more challenging as technology has become more ubiquitous, stretching our information-rich digital trails ever longer.

Over the past two decades, various vendors have developed Intelligent Data Processing (IDP) tools to manage all this information by automating the extraction, ingestion, and structuring of data at scale. These tools have been widely adopted by carriers, but fall short of today’s mounting data challenges–in fact, they’re exasperating them.

McKinsey estimates that underwriters spend 30-to-40% of their time on rote administrative tasks “such as rekeying data or manually executing analysis.” These were the types of tasks that IDPs were supposed to automate and make more efficient—but that’s not what’s happening. In a recent Accenture survey, 64% of underwriters reported that today’s tech either makes no difference or increases their workload. 

Automated data extraction was, until recently, the only way to tame the information deluge. New technologies have paved the way for a better, more seamless approach. Emerging LLM-powered AI represents a new paradigm that eliminates extraction chokepoints, reduces the burden on overtaxed underwriters, and accelerates decisioning.

Generative AI in insurance changes everything

Traditional IDPs were designed to exhaustively extract every piece of data–no matter how irrelevant or repetitive—so that it can be structured into a centralized database and passed along to overloaded human underwriters to query and scrutinize. The more complex and document-laden a process (e.g., loss run reports with intricate hierarchical ordering of nested sets), the more odious the inefficiencies and the more work tossed onto underwriters’ plates.

Insurance solutions touting the “most efficient” or “fastest” data extraction are about as meaningful in 2023 as boasting the “highest print-quality” fax machine. Comprehensive extraction is a relic of a fading technological paradigm. The industry is rightly turning to next-gen AI technologies to free underwriters from repetitive data work (which is better handled by machines anyway) so they can focus on building value and closing deals. 

Sixfold uses state-of-the-art LLMs to synthesize information across multiple sources and generate summaries in plain language for underwriter review. No processing power is misspent on redundant extraction; underwriters’ valuable time is no longer wasted sorting through virtual buckets of well-structured (but context-free) data. 

When processing a life insurance application, traditional IDPs will, for example, extract each mention of the applicant having diabetes, even if it appears across dozens of documents. Unlike AI-powered platforms, IDPs are incapable of discerning meaning from data—underwriters are still required to connect the dots. Sixfold skips the needless chronicling of data points and independently generates clear summations of relevant throughlines (e.g., “The applicant was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes 12 years ago and it’s being properly managed with insulin and diet”), thus freeing underwriters to forgo the data work and render decisions faster.

Sixfold brings the power of advanced AI to insurance underwriting

In effect, Sixfold provides underwriters with a virtual army of researchers, data processors, and writers who know precisely what information is needed to render decisions quickly (and just as importantly, what isn’t). 

It’s already having a huge impact. With Sixfold, companies are accelerating submission-to-quote cycles by as much as 43%, clearing backlogged queues, and massively increasing GWP per underwriter. 

Even better? It’s far easier to get up and running with Sixfold than a traditional IDP. These older systems required huge investments in time and resources to train their ML models on an organization’s unique needs. Sixfold, on the other hand, can be easily—and quickly—configured to match the appetite and needs of specific carriers and programs. It’s more-or-less ready to go out-of-the-box (or out of the virtual SaaS box).

AI is reshaping insurance before our eyes

The marketplace is littered with the remnants of corporate behemoths that misread the technological tea leaves—and in today’s world, giants fall fast. Consider how, in just one decade, Yahoo slid from the world’s most popular website to near-irrelevance. Or how Kodak only took eight years to complete its journey from top-five global brand to ejection from the Dow Jones. Or how, in a mere six years, Blockbuster leaped from its 9,000-plus-location peak into bankruptcy. 

The takeaway: Past performance will not save you. New technological paradigms can seemingly come out of nowhere to reward leaders who had an eye on the future—and expose those who didn’t.

I’m confident that this year will be remembered as an inflection point for generative AI. The way insurance is handled moving forward will be a radical departure from the past. There’s now a clear industry-wide divide between those pursuing iteration and those seeking transformation. Which side do you want to be on?

The past decade saw more than its fair share of insurtech solutions promising to harness the power of “AI.” Many of these tools use hard-to-train algorithms powered by technologies that are years—if not decades—old. These legacy underwriting tools may inject some process efficiencies but don’t address the fact that insurers are struggling more than ever to expand capacity and grow Gross Written Premiums (GWPs) per underwriter. 

Underwriters face a lot of issues

A recent Accenture survey found that underwriters spend 40% of their time on administrative tasks—that’s a full two days of their work week. Inboxes are flooded with more submissions than ever, but by some estimates, underwriters are only able to respond to 10%. 

These aren’t challenges that companies can simply spend their way around; they require a fundamentally new approach. At Sixfold, we believe ascendent technologies, like LLM-powered generative AI, will lead the way. By moving beyond legacy solutions, carriers can take on today’s most pressing underwriting challenges–and the challenges on the horizon.

Ingesting and synthesizing data from disparate sources at scale

In the connected-everything world, insurers have access to more data than ever. This is a blessing and a challenge. On one hand, it guides decisioning and improves outcomes. On the other hand, there’s so much data from so many disparate sources, that it’s impossible to process efficiently.

Underwriters often find themselves sorting through hundreds of pages of documents for a single application. This limits capacity and squeezes GWP per underwriter. The only way to overcome these chokepoints without massively expanding headcount (and dinging already precarious expense ratios) is by using sophisticated AI tools to automate complex business tasks at scale.  

With Sixfold’s state-of-the-art underwriting AI, insurers can seamlessly integrate structured and unstructured data from multiple disparate sources. The platform reflects each company's unique risk appetite, so it automatically surfaces relevant information to accelerate UW decisioning.

Say it in plain language

Sixfold uses LLM-powered generative AI (the same tech behind ChatGPT, Bard, etc.) to summarize findings to underwriters in plain language, not spreadsheets. 

The platform, in effect, gives every underwriter their own virtual research team to build detailed reports on every application. Sixfold even generates coverage recommendations based on the company’s UW format. Compare this to legacy AI tools, which merely repackage information into number-heavy spreadsheets and dashboards, inevitably requiring additional inspection and contextualization from underwriters.

Even better? Plain language summations expand the underwriting talent pool by de-emphasizing technical and computational skillsets that are better handled by machines anyway. This is a crucial break from legacy tools, as insurers are now forced to compete for limited underwriting talent against private-equity-backed firms, insurtechs, MGAs, and other nontraditional insurance companies. 

Opacity in insurance is no longer an option, AI transparency is the new norm

Sixfold was designed with transparency at its core because that’s what today’s customers expect and increasingly what regulators demand. The platform provides full sourcing and lineage of all underwriting decisions with clear semantic summaries, i.e. no more “black boxes.” 

Customers accept automation as part of the modern digital landscape, but that acceptance comes with expectations of transparency, particularly when there are unexpected outcomes. Legacy solutions make it difficult—if not impossible—for insurers to provide customers with the clarity they deserve. Disappointed customers and diminished brand reputation, however, aren’t the only negative outcomes the industry needs to be mindful of.

As scaled automation becomes more ubiquitous, so have the calls for greater transparency from . At all levels of government, there are movements to counter the influence of potential bias through increased transparency and accountability—particularly in crucial areas like insurance. 

The marketplace has long since moved on from “because the algorithm said so,” and insurers must employ tools to reflect those changes.

Beyond legacy AI

We’re not the first to automate underwriting tasks using “AI,” but we’re the first to fundamentally reimagine the underwriting role using state-of-the-art LLM tech to generate business value. Customers are using our platform to accelerate submission-to-quote cycles by as much as 43% and massively increase their GWP per underwriter. 

The role of the underwriter is evolving, and the industry needs a new generation of tools to match. This is why we created Sixfold.