In an effort to feature more insurtechs, Digital Insurance has modified the format of our Meet the insurtech series.
Alex Valdes, Findevor co-founder, shared the following responses, which have been lightly edited.
What's the origin story of the company?
Over the past decade, I built enterprise software for Fortune 500 banks, taking my last startup from zero to an IPO in 2020. At that company, we developed AI workflows to address inefficiencies in credit underwriting processes. The problem was, and still is, banks were facing mounting losses due to synthetic identity fraud, with organized crime rings using bots to submit thousands of fraudulent credit card applications in just minutes. In response, banks implemented rigid fraud controls within underwriting, but these inadvertently turned away tens of millions of dollars from good customers.
To counter this, we built AI tools to reevaluate applications flagged as fraudulent.
After taking the company public, I spent three years in Europe, where I began mulling over the potential for the latest advances in AI, especially generative AI, for a similar application in commercial real estate underwriting. While I identified major inefficiencies that could be addressed through agentic AI, we quickly learned that the appetite for solving these problems in real estate wasn't quite there yet.
It's kind of funny how the market pulled us to insurance—during customer discovery, we connected with a few commercial property underwriters—not at real estate firms, but at insurance carriers. Those conversations were surprising. The same problems we had seen in real estate existed in insurance underwriting, but it was clear that the appetite and urgency to address them was far much greater.
And this isn't just a "nice-to-have" problem to solve—insurance executives described it as a "hair-on-fire" issue. One executive put it bluntly: "If we don't do this, we're going to die." Maybe not immediately, but certainly long term.
This urgency reminded me of what I witnessed in banking during the fintech revolution. After the financial crisis, challenger and neobanks emerged, pushing traditional banks to innovate or risk becoming irrelevant. Insurance is now at a similar tipping point, driven by competition from insurtechs, inflation, and weather-related disasters. To say the least, we committed our resources to insurance underwriting, and the rest is history.
When was it founded and/or when was the product launched?
The company was founded in July 2024. I began customer discovery in January of last year and launched the first minimum viable product in June. After iterating many times and receiving strong validation from over 150 hours so far of conversations with C-suite executives across dozens of top 50 insurance carriers, we rolled out the first component of our end-to-end agentic platform—our AI-powered pre-qualifier—in November. Now, we're thrilled to launch our first fully autonomous AI agent at the end of January.
Can you tell me about the founders/founding team?
The founding team is made up of myself and Virgil Tataru. I've shared a bit about myself already, so I'll just add that I've been entrepreneurial my entire life—from selling bubble gum on the playground in elementary school to launching my first business with five employees in high school. That business paid my way through college, where I later sold it for a 500% return on my initial investment. My last company marked my first foray into the tech world, and over nearly a decade, I helped grow it from zero to an IPO in 2020.
Virgil, our CTO, brings over five years of experience at Amazon, where he worked as a Machine Learning Engineer, developing deep learning models and scalable infrastructure for Amazon's advertising business. Originally from Bucharest, Romania, Virgil overcame significant challenges in a post-communist Romania, earning a full scholarship to NYU, where he studied across its Shanghai and New York campuses. His expertise in AI and full-stack development drives Findevor's technical vision and innovation.
Any meaning behind the company name?
The name Findevor combines "fintech" and "endeavor," reflecting our mission to tackle meaningful challenges in the financial sector, starting with insurance. While we're a true AI-first company, our tools are designed to enhance human intelligence and decision making, helping insurers improve underwriting, reduce inefficiencies, and drive profitable growth.
The "endeavor" in our name captures our team's entrepreneurial spirit and commitment to disciplined innovation. It represents the grit, speed, and collaboration we bring to solving insurers' toughest problems. Ultimately, Findevor embodies our vision: to empower carriers with premium agentic AI that transforms inefficiencies into opportunities, losses into profits, and positions them for long-term, sustainable success.
How many employees?
Currently, only the founders are full-time. In addition to the co-founders, we're building an R&D team with a focus on AI expertise from big-tech backgrounds. We've onboarded an engineer from Microsoft and plan to hire three to five additional engineers in the coming months.
We've also assembled a team of senior executive partners with decades of experience as underwriting and innovation executives at top carriers like Travelers, Chubb, and USAA. These partners bring invaluable insights into the challenges insurers face, helping us shape our product strategy and accelerate enterprise partnerships.
Where is the company based?
We're headquartered in New York City.
What pain points is the technology trying to solve?
Our agentic AI platform directly addresses annual revenue and cost inefficiencies, empowering even non-technical executive users to seamlessly interact with an AI agent, much like working with a mid-level underwriter. With a simple natural language query, users can delegate the AI agent to autonomously execute entire workflows, enabling them to say "yes" to better-quality risks, "no" to lower-quality risks, roll out new products or enter new markets faster, and ultimately drive profitable revenue growth.
Of the hundreds of billions in annual waste that insurers face, premium leakage alone costs carriers tens of billions annually due to rigid underwriting processes and mispriced risks. Our Pre-Qualifier and Step-Up Underwriting tools help underwriters capture previously missed opportunities to issue policies within their risk appetite.
Claims losses directly related to ineffective risk evaluation lead to higher payouts, also costing insurers tens of billions annually. Our tools enable carriers to assess risks more accurately, resulting in better pricing and more effective coverage decisions.
We also tackle the billions spent annually by carriers on outdated and inefficient underwriting processes. SAM, our AI agent for Strategic Analytics Management, automates data analysis to reduce costs, save time, and enable underwriters to make faster, more informed decisions.
Additionally, our platform helps insurers expand into emerging markets, such as the gig economy and cyber, unlocking new growth opportunities.
Another major challenge is the slow speed-to-market, which imposes significant—and potentially existential—opportunity costs for carriers. Our platform streamlines workflows, allowing insurers to launch new products and enter markets faster, capture emerging opportunities, and maintain a competitive edge.
Our AI agent integrates internal and external datasets to transform natural language commands into actionable insights and complex data analyses. For example, underwriters can analyze vast amounts of data to uncover insights, such as profitability trends in policy and claims data, to create new underwriting guidelines. Using these guidelines, they can reevaluate previously rejected submissions with updated criteria, capturing missed opportunities to write new business within their risk appetite—all with a single natural language command. What currently takes weeks or months can now be completed in moments.
Addressing these critical pain points, Findevor transforms how insurers operate. From reducing costs and improving risk evaluation to accelerating growth and innovation, our platform empowers carriers to achieve profitable growth in an increasingly dynamic and competitive insurance landscape.
What funding rounds has the company had?
We recently closed a pre-seed funding round to expand our engineering team and accelerate our R&D roadmap—a process already underway.
What's ahead?
Over the next year, we plan to significantly expand our full-time team as we scale operations and prepare for our next stage of growth. We've chosen to partner with one or two enterprise carriers to co-create and customize key components of our platform. As our first partners, they'll gain exclusive access to highly favorable rates, top-tier AI expertise, and guidance from our team of seasoned industry executives.
Our goal is to deliver a system capable of generating a 10X ROI on their initial investments in the short term, while unlocking invaluable long-term advantages to thrive in tomorrow's competitive market.
