Meet the insurtech: HighPeak
A Prudential venture, HighPeak, is preparing to launch a holistic health and wealth planning service based on artificial intelligence (AI) technology. The service aims to reduce risks, especially for “sandwich” generation adults pressured to take care of both adult children and aged parents, according to Sharon Rodriguez, CEO of HighPeak, which began its work about one year ago.
Sharon Rodriguez, CEO of HighPeak.
Life insurers had been focused on AI/ML models, making investment internally, she said. Rodriguez saw momentum and collaboration between the life insurance business and technology providers on longevity issues, and sought to commercialize its potential with HighPeak. Its product is an individualized report of clients’ future health care costs, including long-term care costs.
“We are delivering the most personalized data-driven insights that are available in the market, specific for individuals as well as their dependents, parents and children, and we have the value of the breadth of the data that’s in our proprietary data sets as well as third-party data sources,” said Rodriguez. “We recognized when we had a gap and we augmented our data sets to increase the level of accuracy in our predictions.”
HighPeak puts an AI copilot alongside its solution to help advisors better explain the data it collects, what it means, and how to act on it.
“Our output today is truly an individualized report of your future health care costs, long term care costs, output and outlay on a year on year basis, from about age 45-ish through predicted age of lifespan, and broken down across parameters of health care versus long term care, when Medicare kicks in, and things of that nature,” said Rodriguez. “The insights are logical.”
Rodriguez brought insurance industry experience from strategy and operations roles at AIG and MetLife to her role as CEO at HighPeak, along with venture capital entrepreneurship experience as a partner at 1843 Capital since April 2022. She also was an executive, advisor and member of the founding team of Unqork, a financial and insurance sales technology provider, from 2017 to 2022. Prudential, the sole investor in HighPeak, approached Rodriguez to lead the startup.
“One of the things that I learned in my last two jobs is really that power of the user and really listening to your customer and how they want to use your tools and assets so that you can support them in the best way possible to do that,” she said.
