Battery Ventures is a investment firm that focuses on technology. It invests in potentially, category-defining businesses in markets including application software, IT infrastructure technologies, consumer-internet and mobile services, and industrial technologies.

Battery Ventures

Bay Partners is a venture capital firm based in Menlo Park, California. Founded by John Freidenrich in 1976, it has funded over 200 information technology and healthcare businesses.

Bay Partners

U.S. Venture Partners (USVP) is a venture capital partnership, helping entrepreneurs transform their ideas and efforts into world-changing companies. The firm focuses on early-stage ventures in information technology and health care, where innovation is unbridled and has led to the creation of economic wealth and millions of jobs over the past thirty-plus years of the firm's existence.  Areas of particular interest to our investment professionals include enterprise software, IT security, consumer internet, mobile, and e-commerce, healthcare, and IT-enabled healthcare services. The USVP team consists of former entrepreneurs, technologists, corporate executives, financial professionals, and industry domain experts.

U.S. Venture Partners

Guidewire Software

InsurTech: Infrastructure

<div>
 
 Shift Technology, based in France, provides a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution for insurers to automate claims and detect fraud during the underwriting and claims processing stages. The company&rsquo;s platform uses artificial intelligence (AI) and a combination of internal and third-party data to flag potentially fraudulent claims. Furthermore, it provides a white-label mobile app that takes advantage of the company&rsquo;s fraud detection capabilities and enables insurers to streamline their entire claims functions from First Notification of Losses (FNOLs) to disbursements. In addition to France, the company maintains regional offices in the US, Japan, the UK, Spain, and Singapore.
 
 
 Key customers and partnerships
 
 
 As of May 2021, the company had a workforce of 350 people, and it claimed to have analyzed ~2 billion claims globally. It also worked with more than 100 customers across 25 countries, including insurance companies such as AXA, Generali France, and Mitsui Sumitomo. 
 
 
 Shift collaborated with big data provider Legentic in April 2022, through which it aimed to allow its customers access structured data to minimize fraudulent claims and improve claims processing times. It also formed strategic partnerships to integrate its product as part of other insurtech&rsquo;s product offerings such as with Sapiens, providing the latter&rsquo;s customers with alerts regarding fraudulent claims.
 
 
 Funding and financials
 
 
 In May 2021, Shift Technology raised 
 <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/2834">
 USD 220 million in a Series D 
 </a>
 funding in a round led by Advent International at a valuation of over USD 1 billion. The company expected to use the funding to expand its presence in the property and casualty market and also venture into other insurance verticals such as health. The funding was to also be channeled toward accelerating business growth in the US. In November 2021, the company received an undisclosed investment from Guidewire, as an 
 <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/6418">
 extension to its Series D
 </a>
 round. The company was to use the new funds to further develop its technology and support its go-to-market strategies.
 
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<div>
 
 Netherlands-based FRISS offers an AI-based platform for underwriting and detecting fraud during the claims process. The platform integrates with core insurance systems, such as Guidewire, and uses more than 130 internal and external data sources to screen customers and identify potential risks and help insurers lower their loss ratios. FRISS&rsquo;s proprietary detection engine is self-learning and can carry out analysis to detect fraud in real-time while paying out claims.&nbsp;
 
 
 As of July 2021, FRISS had over 200 implementations globally carrying out 130 million screenings per year&mdash;resulting in fraud savings in excess of USD 1 billion. FRISS also has a partnership with reinsurer Munich Re to help its clients implement fraud detection technologies in their processes.
 
 
 The company raised USD 65 million in a Series B funding round led by Accel-KKR. FRISS expects to use the funding for product development and business expansion.
 
</div>

<div>
 
 Paris-based Akur8 develops AI solutions to automate the insurance pricing process, specifically for non-life and health insurance. The company uses proprietary algorithms to automatically generate models that can be used by insurers to determine insurance premiums while maintaining full transparency and control of the models created. Features include automated GLM modeling, geographical modeling that incorporates external variables, and the ability to aggregate and combine different models together. The company claims that its platform can enable actuaries to develop models 10x faster than traditional methods while simultaneously improving model performance and predictive power.
 
 
 Key customers and partnership
 
 
 The company has worked with over 80 insurers worldwide, which includes top carriers such as Axa, Generali, Munich Re, wefox, and AllClear.
 
 
 Funding and financials
 
 
 In July 2023, the company 
 <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/20113">
 raised USD 27.3 million in venture funding
 </a>
 led by Guidewire, with participation from BlackFin Capital Partners and FinTLV Ventures. However, it did not disclose the use of proceeds.
 
</div>

Pinpoint Predictive is a company that provides risk assessment and predictive analytics services for property and casualty (P&amp;C) insurers. Founded in 2015 and based in San Mateo, California, the company offers a platform that uses machine learning and behavioral insights to help insurers improve their underwriting and actuarial decisions. Its primary service is a risk selection platform that aims to quantify profitability and improve loss ratios for P&amp;C insurers.Its platform uses deep learning algorithms and behavioral predictors to assess individual-level risk for homeowners and personal auto insurance. It predicts claims frequency, claims severity, loss cost, the likelihood of litigation, SIU referral, cancellation, and premium leakage. The system analyzes trillions of individual behavioral predictors on over 250 million US adults to generate these predictions. Pinpoint's service is typically used at two key points: Before a customer signs up and before policy renewal.&nbsp;Key customers and partnershipsIn January 2023, the company announced a partnership with Glacier Insurance Company, enabling Glacier to leverage Pinpoint's top-of-funnel predictions to streamline customer experiences and improve risk selection.In November 2022, Pinpoint joined Guidewire's Insurtech Vanguards program, an initiative the P&amp;C cloud platform provider led to connect insurers with innovative InsurTech solutions. This collaboration allowed Pinpoint to work with Guidewire's P&amp;C customers and receive strategic guidance from industry experts.

Property owners and real estate companies are able to handle larger portfolios while offering faster and cheaper services.

Residential PropTech

Hover offers a mobile app that allows homeowners to capture photos with their smartphones which can be transformed into fully-interactive 3D models which can be used to measure, design, and estimate projects while providing professionals with detailed information. The platform also provides insurance professionals' claim cycle workflows with up-to-date photos and detailed property measurements to create accurate claim estimates.In February 2024, Hover added new automated features to its app to streamline project management for contractors. The updates include Material Lists, Checklists, and Job Invites. Material Lists quickly generate order-ready lists with customizable templates, Checklists help document and communicate project details, and Job Invites enhance collaboration among professionals and homeowners.

Democratizing financial technology with a suite of API-based solutions

FinTech Infrastructure

Switzerland-based Imburse provides a cloud-based infrastructure platform for companies to integrate digital payment methods including bank transfers, credit cards, checks, vouchers, digital wallets, etc. to legacy systems through a single API. The platform also includes AML/KYC verification solutions. Imburse caters to large organizations primarily in the insurance, banking, travel, utility, and hospitality industries, and its client base includes Generali Group, iptiQ, and Swiss Re. As of June 2021, the company focused on the European market, with offices in Zurich, Lisbon, and London.The platform charges its clients based on the number of tenancies (instances of software applications serving multiple customers) and transactions, regardless of the integrations to existing providers, value of transactions, or the overall number of providers and technologies.In June 2021, Imburse raised EUR 10 million (USD 12 million) in Series A funding from Accenture, DST Global, and Addition to expand operations to the US. Along with the funding, Imburse joined Accenture Ventures’ “Project Spotlight” to access its global innovation network and co-innovate with Accenture’s staff.

Data Infrastructure & Analytics

<div>
 
 Indico Data transforms unstructured data into actionable insights. With the AI and ML-powered Indico Unstructured Data Platform&trade;, enterprises of all sizes can automate, analyze, and apply unstructured data &ndash; documents, emails, images, videos and more &ndash; to a wide range of enterprise workflows. This enables them to gain rich insight and maximize the value of their existing software investments, including RPA, CRM, ERP, BI, by enabling these systems to work with unstructured data.
 
</div>

Taking commercial activities to new heights

Commercial Drone Tech

Betterview is a property intelligence and risk management platform that leverages artificial intelligence (AI) and computer vision to help insurance companies identify and mitigate property risk. The company's platform analyzes aerial imagery and geospatial data to generate accurate property information, enabling insurers to automate pricing, underwriting, and renewals while focusing strategic action on critical properties.
Betterview's technology offerings include AI-powered detection of over 100 property attributes, predictive risk scores for roof conditions and weather-related perils, a historical image library for change analysis, and rapid post-catastrophe imagery. These solutions empower insurers with efficient underwriting, property condition identification, risk mitigation, and enhanced visualization of properties.
In December 2023, Nearmap, a leading provider of aerial imagery and location intelligence solutions, announced the acquisition of Betterview. This acquisition aimed to integrate Betterview's AI solutions into Nearmap's technology stack, enabling better visualization and interpretation of property data for insurance customers and partners.

Pinpoint Predictive offers property and casualty insurers loss predictions and risk scores with only a name and address. Their platform allows insurers to leverage unmatched risk selection at the beginning of the customer journey.

Akur8 is a developer of an AI-driven insurance pricing and reserving platform designed to provide AI-powered pricing automation and optimization for insurance carriers. The company's platform integrates with leading-edge algorithms dedicated to insurance pricing. The platform leverages machine learning to automate and optimize insurance pricing, providing significant advantages in the insurance market.

Indico Data transforms unstructured data into actionable insights. With the AI and ML-powered Indico Unstructured Data Platform™, enterprises of all sizes can automate, analyze, and apply unstructured data – documents, emails, images, videos and more – to a wide range of enterprise workflows. This enables them to gain rich insight and maximize the value of their existing software investments, including RPA, CRM, ERP, BI, by enabling these systems to work with unstructured data.

Through the application of its secure, patented SaaS technology, Champ Titles (www.champtitles.com) digitizes the process of vehicle titling between state government, insurance carriers, financial institutions, vehicle sellers, consumers, and others. Champ Titles, founded in 2018, is focused on creating efficiencies and benefits for all vehicle title ecosystem members. Champ Titles has developed several solutions, all of which are built on a shared platform that serves different industry verticals. This common chassis has allowed the company to adapt its technology for insurance carriers, automotive retailers, and state governments, resulting in lower costs, increased security, and the easy transfer of ownership, benefiting all members of the vehicle title ecosystem.

Veruna is an insurtech developer of the Salesforce-based agency management platform. Veruna is an agency management system provider that offers an AMS designed to meet the needs of the modern insurance agency through true customization and integration. Veruna is challenging independent insurance agents to walk away from the status quo and embrace change. Veruna is committed to enabling independent agencies to grow their business by changing the way they do business.

Betterview is a property intelligence platform that assists property insurers in analyzing, scoring, managing, and monitoring property risk.  Betterview improves the customer experience by accelerating decisions and improving risk at every point of the lifecycle. Betterview combines geospatial data sources, interprets them using proprietary ML technology, and converts the resulting insights into understandable and actionable insights.

Shift Technology delivers AI-native decision automation and optimization solutions built specifically for the global insurance industry. Addressing several critical processes across the insurance policy lifecycle, Shift helps insurers achieve faster, more accurate claims and policy resolutions. Shift has analyzed billions of insurance transactions to date and was presented Frost & Sullivan’s 2020 Global Claims Solutions for Insurance Market Leadership Award.

Friss is the provider of analytics software for fraud, risk, and compliance for P&C insurers. Friss has 100% dedication to fraud, risk, and compliance for non-life insurance companies worldwide. FRISS helps insurers to achieve profitable portfolio growth and improve their perception in the market as trustworthy insurer. FRISS is a ready-to-use business solution and improves the insurers' loss ratios by identifying high risks and fraud at quotation, underwriting, and claim handling across all private and commercial lines. The FRISS® Score enables better decisions since it indicates the risk for each quotation, policy or claim. FRISS is global market leader with 150+ implementations in over 30 countries. FRISS (www.friss.com) offers a complete solution for fraud, risk and compliance.  ☆ Risk assessment at underwriting ☆ Generate profitable growth for your portfolio by real-time automated detection and assessment of risks during the underwriting process. It is important to prevent fraud and assess risks by having a holistic view of prospects before they enter your portfolio. The FRISS underwriting solution provides an intelligent and uniform risk estimation, which is proven to improve the combined ratio significantly. ☆ Prevent and detect fraud at claims ☆ The general assumption is that, at average, around 10% of all Insurance Claims are tied to some sort of fraud. In order to finance these malicious claims, we all pay additional for our Insurance Policies. Three things are important: - How to detect fraud correctly and efficiently? - How to detect malicious customers in time? - How do you handle this in your daily operational business? Reduce your loss ratio by increasing the chances of detecting fraud and limit false positives to a minimum. Use automated fraud detection during the claims process to make an accurate and objective estimation of the risks related to a claim. It improves straight through processing (STP), and claims that need further attention will be recognized directly. ☆ Become and stay compliant ☆ Compliance concerns all insurance processes. Become and stay compliant with the latest legislation and regulations. Knowing and screening your customers will prevent reputational damage and avoids high penalties. Gain insight into Ultimate Beneficial Owners (UBOs). This will enhance the quality of your underwriting process. Furthermore, administrative burdens will be reduced to a minimum. FRISS is recognized by Gartner in 2014 as the European market leader and striving to become the global leader.

Imburse is a cloud-based payments integration platform the can connect any enterprise system to any payments rail, any payment provider, any payment technology in any market, for collections AND payouts. Our clients can seamlessly connect any core, CRM and ERP system to Imburse to initiate paymets and benefit from a single source of reporting truth.  We help CFOS, COOs and CMOs to better engage customers and to drive business efficiency and benefit from being completely operationally insulated form the payments world. Deploy any payment provider or payment technology in minutes with ZERO impact on operations and finance. The Imburse platform is an enterprise SaaS solution that supports multi-tenancy deployments.

Flyreel provides total property understanding. Its AI Assistant guides policyholders through effortless self-service inspections and claims workflows, thoroughly documenting interior and exterior data like property risks, hazards, features, materials, and more.

Hover is making the homeowner journey easy, transparent and fun. Starting with the home improvement industry,  we’re answering age-old questions like, “What is it going to look like?” and “What is it going to cost?”, by helping homeowners and pros visualize what’s possible with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and interactive 3D property models. Homeowners, contractors, and insurance professionals all use Hover to get fully measured, accurate, and interactive models of any property—in a matter of minutes, and with just a few snaps of a smartphone camera.

Guidewire Software, Inc. provides technology solutions to the property, casualty, and workers compensation insurance industry. It offers ClaimCenter, a Web-based claims system that supports various lines of personal, commercial, and workers' compensation insurance; BillingCenter, a Web-based enterprise application for coordinating, executing, and recording receivables transactions; and PolicyCenter, a Web-based underwriting and policy administration system for personal and commercial line carriers. The company also offers implementation services; and assessment services for property and casualty companies in North America. Its solutions are used to perform various insurance operations, including billing, underwriting, policy, and claim management. Guidewire Software, Inc. was founded in 2001 and is based in San Mateo, California with additional offices in London, Munich, Paris, Sydney, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Toronto.

<div> Guidewire Software, Inc. (NYSE: GWRE) is a leading provider of software solutions for the property and casualty (P&amp;C) insurance industry. Founded in 2001 and headquartered in San Mateo, California, Guidewire offers a cloud-based platform that enables P&amp;C insurers to engage, innovate, and grow efficiently. Guidewire's product portfolio includes InsuranceSuite, which comprises PolicyCenter for underwriting and policy management, ClaimCenter for claims management, and BillingCenter for billing and receivables management. The company also offers digital engagement applications, data and analytics products, and the Guidewire Cloud Platform. Guidewire's solutions are designed to help insurers automate core operations, improve customer experience, and adapt quickly to market changes. As of September 2024, over 570 insurance brands in 42 countries rely on Guidewire's products. In June 2024, Columbia Insurance Group selected Guidewire InsuranceSuite to modernize its core business operations and improve service to agents and policyholders. In September 2024, Arch Insurance North America chose Guidewire ClaimCenter as its new claims management system. Guidewire has also been focusing on cloud migration, with analysts noting the company's strong cloud sales and transition toward cloud offerings as key drivers of its financial performance and stock price growth. </div>

Guidewire Software prices $600M senior notes

The latest line of defense against rising cyber attacks

Cyber Insurance

Provides cyber insurance as a core product, often bundled with cybersecurity solutions and a team that assists in detection and response

Provides commercial property and casualty insurance products with cyber insurance as an additional product offering

Provides solutions for insurers/brokers to obtain an overview of security health and risk exposure for potential and existing clients

Provides solutions for insurers that use AI-based approaches and predictive models to quantify the financial impact of cyber risks

ANALYST_QUICK_TAKE

INCUMBENTS_PRESENT

PROMINENT_CATEGORY

<div>
 
Guidewire has reinforced its collaboration with Shift Technology, a provider of SaaS insurance solutions aimed at fraud detection and claims automation. This partnership aims to develop insurance fraud detection powered by artificial intelligence (AI).
This strengthened partnership will facilitate a quick integration of Shift's fraud detection technology into Guidewire's solutions. The aim here is to enhance the productivity of claim handlers. Shift's technology exploits AI and large language models for fraud detection, risk detection in underwriting, and detection in subrogation, and it operates across 25 countries.

</div> Analyst QuickTake: 
 The collaboration builds on a five-year relationship, with Shift being among the first to develop a cloud-based integration and contribute to Guidewire's Autopilot Workflow Service fraud module. Meanwhile, Shift has received <a href="https: 
//sp-edge.com/updates/6418"> strategic funding </a> from Guidewire.

Guidewire Software

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