Announcing Sixfold’s Series A Led By Salesforce Ventures

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