Zurich North America has named two finalist startup companies in its Innovation Championship program designed to promote sustainable operations in the insurance industry.
Baltimore-based Dynamhex creates software to help cities and companies focus on climate action and measure results. Menlo Park, Calif.-based One Concern is building a resilience intelligence platform that assesses impacts of disasters on infrastructure networks and ecosystems. These two companies were among 12 chosen for the program and seeded with $100,000 each for a three-month period to accelerate and develop their ideas.
As the winners, Dynamhex and One Concern will receive more financial and non-financial support from Zurich North America to continue developing their products and services. They will proceed to a second three-month “accelerator” phase of the program that will include mentoring from Zurich executives and a further business use case evaluation. Zurich North America’s underwriting and risk engineering staff will support the accelerator phase for Dynamhex and One Concern.
Zurich’s Innovation Championship was designed to promote innovation in four areas: prevention and mitigation, simplicity, sustainability and “insurance reimagined.” The prevention and mitigation category concerns reducing risk, and sustainability is meant to develop sustainable solutions for businesses.
According to Zurich North America, the next phase in the program will explore Dynamhex’s solution as a tool to measure aggregate carbon emissions and evaluate how users of the solution can address emissions. For One Concern, Zurich will help develop its strategies to improve upon traditional risk mitigation efforts.
Zurich’s program to support start-up innovators is part of its plans to reach net-zero emissions in its operations by 2030.
