In an effort to feature more insurtechs, Digital Insurance has modified the format of our Meet the insurtech series.
Richard Hartley, CEO and co-founder of Cytora, shared the following responses, which have been lightly edited.
What's the origin story of the company?
Cytora was incubated at the University of Cambridge and became the first technology company to raise funding from the university.
The initial vision came from the founding team's research into using artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze large volumes of data to assess risk. This work highlighted the potential for applying AI to industries that rely heavily on understanding and predicting risks before exclusively focusing on commercial insurance. The vision is to digitize how risk flows using AI enabling brokers, insurers and reinsurers with a better way to process and make decisions on risk.
The Cytora team recognised that the underlying structure that insurance is served on remains analogue, eroding confidence in the insurance industry to scale and meet the rising level of risk.
Cytora was established with a mission to enable commercial insurers to become digital-first, accelerating the transition to digital risk flows that decouple premium growth from expense growth.
When was it founded and/or when was the product launched?
Cytora was founded in 2015.
Can you tell me about the founders/founding team?
The founding team at Cytora met during incubation at Cambridge University.
Any meaning behind the company name?
Cytora is the name of a blue butterfly from the Cote d'Ivoire.
How many employees?
Our headcount is now around 100 people, up from 50 people last year, and so we have seen rapid growth in the size of the team across North America, Asia, Europe and the U.K.
Where is the company based?
Cytora is jointly headquartered in the U.S. and United Kingdom, with a growing team based in the U.S. and Europe. The company transitioned to a permanent remote-first working model in August 2020.
What pain points is the technology trying to solve?
Cytora enables brokers, insurers and reinsurers to optimize risk workflows by digitizing risk intake and automating workflows, enabling risks to be evaluated against risk appetite, portfolio strategy and other configurable rules. The Cytora platform matches the risk to multiple segments enabling the risk to be processed differently: on-cover customers, filtering by risk appetite, ranking by priority, highlighting areas of outsized risk and enabling straight-through processing based on complexity levels.
With visibility over workflows and control over portfolio shape, insurers can enhance their portfolio, identifying changing market dynamics and levels of risk and adjusting the attractiveness of different risk segments. Cytora's live risk insights can be easily operationalized into front line execution providing senior management control over the target portfolio and enabling consistent application of the appetite and the business objectives.
Customers include Allianz, Chubb and Markel. Cytora partnership resulted in an 113% increase in productivity (GWP per FTE) for Markel's underwriting team. As well as increasing productivity, the partnership has led to a reduction in quote turnaround times for Markel's strategic partners from an average of one day to just two hours. It underscores how digital transformation and clever use of AI can substantially increase efficiency by automating routine tasks. Prior to working with Cytora, Markel estimated that its underwriters spent 30% of their time on low skill and value tasks. Senior underwriters had to assess every incoming submission and route them to the appropriate underwriter. This prevented these skilled team members from dedicating more time to more complex risks or managing broker relationships.
What funding rounds has the company had?
Cytora has raised $50 million to date. The company has secured significant investments to support its growth. In 2019, Cytora completed a £25 million ($32 million) Series B funding round led by EQT Ventures, with participation from existing investors Cambridge Innovation Capital, Parkwalk and other angel investors. This funding accelerated product expansion.
What's ahead?
Cytora's ambition is to build the world's most comprehensive data ecosystems for insurers, and the company continually strives to ensure that its platform can deliver the latest technology and data to its customers.
Cytora announced earlier in February the latest version of Cytora's digital risk processing platform. Cytora Platform 3.0 enhances the capabilities of the platform by harnessing agentic AI in a fully explainable way, in one of the first uses of agentic AI in insurance.
Agentic AI orchestrates teams of digitization agents that think, work and explain like a human to complete a task. It unlocks the next level of performance and explainability across the commercial insurance intake. Digitization agents explain their execution like fully fledged members of a team, providing transparent, reliable results and creating capacity. Extraction tasks are executed by seven agents in parallel, who provide their own reasoning paths, resulting in transparent confidence scoring at the field level. Risk professionals can be certain of digitization results, deepening automation across underwriting and claim workflows. Chain of thought reasoning will be accessible in the human review console to assist admin users with validation and exception management.
Platform 3.0 digitizes any transaction type regardless of size and complexity with zero training required. This enables insurers to digitize their entire intake (from new business to claims, to renewals, to MTAs) including the most complex risk submissions documents such as loss runs and schedules of values which can contain thousands of repeating fields.
Cytora looks forward to seeing the full potential of agentic risk digitization realized through the insurance industry.
