Sixfold’s Remarkable First Seven Months

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.