How insurtechs are using AI, from life insurance to wildfires

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Insurers are utilizing artificial intelligence to improve their practices, from simplifying the claims process to providing real-time risk analysis. 

Using AI comes with risks of its own, but insurers that can mitigate these risks via data management, transparency, bias mitigation and governance principles can find success. 

"To guard against bias in AI, insurers need to choose the right data or information set," Richard Wiedenbeck, chief AI officer at Ameritas, told Digital Insurance's Michael Shashoua. "For instance, a bank applying AI to credit card data from the past 70 years would end up with a bias against women. That is because, in the U.S., women could not have credit cards in their own name until the 1974 passage of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act."

Wiedenbeck also cautioned that information sets or data, such as collections of PDFs or images, may not be structured in a way that AI can fully process.

Read more: Insurers' share AI hiring strategy 

Some of the products designed by insurtechs were built to help address these issues. For instance, ZestyAI's product Z-FIRE, which launched in 2019, began as a property-specific wildfire risk assessment tool. Now, the tool has expanded to cover severe convective storms (including hail and wind), non-weather water damage and more.

"Our products have always been about more than just technology, they're about trust and transparency," ZestyAI's Co-founder and Chief Product Officer Kumar Dhuvur told Digital Insurance's Grace Crane. "By collaborating closely with regulators and insurers, we ensure our models meet the highest standards of reliability. That foundation has allowed us to scale and earn the trust of some of the largest insurers in the country."

Read more: Insurance executives forgo AI for sustainability 

Other AI tools in insurance were built to simplify the insurance process. Linqura's LinqCo-Pilot seamlessly connects insurers, brokers and agents with the right carriers by intelligently curating vast amounts of insurance data in an effort to drive faster, smarter, and more profitable insurance decisions.

"Commercial agents lose time and revenue because insurance is too complex," Euan King and Mark Stender, Linqura co-founders, told Digital Insurance. "They're expected to be specialists across hundreds of industries, yet the data they need is scattered, outdated or buried in PDFs. This leads to missed opportunities, inefficient sales processes and lower revenue. Linqura's LinqCo-Pilot changes that. It acts as an AI-powered expert, instantly providing agents with the right risk classification, coverage insights, underwriting guidance and business intelligence—turning every agent into a specialist on every account. No more guesswork. No more sifting through carrier guides. Just faster, smarter decisions that drive more commercial revenue."

Read more about how five insurtechs are leveraging AI in their businesses.

Claudine Gossett

WealthSmyth AI's mission to ease the life insurance sale process

Andrew Kass, Sam Henry and Wendi Henry created WealthSmyth AI with the goal of making it fast and easy to buy and sell life insurance and annuities.

"The focus with WealthSmyth AI was to help carriers and distributors collaborate in a whole new way," Sam Henry, co-founder and CEO, told Digital Insurance's Grace Crane. "The sales platform is built first for independent agency teams, delivering a consumer-quality web and mobile experience. The tool enables agents to find their ideal clients, collaborate with team members, run their playbook consistently at scale, manage deals across multiple carriers and build their book of business."

The company is working closely with charter agencies and early adopters to help shape WealthSmyth AI for the real-world productivity needs of independent brokerages. The current focus is its first phase, AI as Copilot, building the infrastructure and reengineering workflows to lay the foundation for predictable, AI-driven growth. 

Read more: Meet the Insurtech: WealthSmyth AI

David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

Linqura uses data to help agents and insurers with risk analysis

Linqura was founded by Euan King and Mark Stender to help agents and insurers leverage data to make better insurance decisions. 

"The insurance industry has no shortage of data, but agents and brokers still struggle to place risks efficiently and profitably," King and Stender told Digital Insurance's Grace Crane. "The process is slow, manual, and often based on gut instinct rather than precision. We built Linqura to change that. By leveraging AI-driven data intelligence, we give agents instant clarity on specific risks profiles and recommendations needed to close with confidence—removing the guesswork, reducing time wasted on declined submissions, and ultimately increasing agency revenue."

In the first half of 2025, the company plans to have many new feature releases, including precision leads, coverage analysis and comparison and LinqConnect, an API integration solution. They are also constantly tweaking our algorithms to improve the quality of responses.

Read more: Meet the insurtech: Linqura 

Cytora

Cytora uses AI to assess risk

Cytora, headed by Richard Hartley, began 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," Hartley told Digital Insurance's Grace Crane. "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 company's goal 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.

Read more: Meet the insurtech: Cytora 

Findevor

Findevor's journey from banks to insurance

Findevor was originally created by Alex Valdes to reevaluate bank applications flagged as fraudulent with AI tools, he then applied the same tools to commercial real estate, and now insurance. 

"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," Valdes told Digital Insurance's Grace Crane. "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."

The company's 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.

Read more: Meet the insurtech: Findevor 

ZestyAI

ZestyAI's products provide precise wildfire risk assessments

ZestyAI began as PowerScout, founded by Attila Toth and Kumar Dhuvur, which was a clean energy marketplace, helping homeowners transition to renewable energy. As there became a lack of funding for renewable projects, they shifted to data.

"We had built a database covering 120 million rooftops across the U.S. and realized this property-level insight could serve industries beyond clean energy," Dhuvur told Digital Insurance's Grace Crane. "After months of research and talking with experts, we discovered a glaring need in property and casualty insurance. Insurers were grappling with outdated tools that couldn't keep up with increasingly severe wildfires and other risks."

The company's first product, Z-FIRE, launched in 2019, and was designed to provide precise, property-specific wildfire risk assessments. Z-FIRE quickly gained attention as the first AI-powered wildfire model approved by the California Department of Insurance as part of a carrier rate filing.

Read more: Meet the insurtech: ZestyAI