Meet the insurtech: Hyperexponential

Excel spreadsheets oppress insurance pricing, as Amrit Santhirasenan, co-founder and CEO of Hyperexponential, says. His company, a startup founded in late 2017, provides an analytical pricing model platform supporting insurance underwriting.

“I got very fed up with the state of pricing technology in insurance companies,” said Santhirasenan, adding that pricing decisions are the biggest and most influential decisions for their profitability. “I could see in the last five or six years when I was working in the insurance markets, the opportunity to take advantage of cutting edge technology that finally kind of caught up with the complex, very heterogeneous, mixed nature of the insurance companies’ underwriting challenges. We built a platform that takes the horrible spreadsheet-based federated landscape of tools that insurance companies typically use to support their underwriting decisions, and brings that into the 21st century.”

Hyperexponential’s platform allows users to configure it themselves. “We don’t sell spreadsheets. We sell Excel for the 21st century,” said Santhirasenan. “We have a whole range of visualizations of tooling that our clients can configure themselves.”

Clients using the platform configure a variety of data sources to build their underwriting models, according to Santhirasenan.

“Our product can connect to third party data sources, pull data from SEC filings and have other proprietary third party data sources as well,” he said. “We build a very versatile and integrate-able product. Our clients have big complex enterprise technology landscapes, and they often typically continue connecting to multiple data sources — tens of data sources, their own internal database, as well as external data, and then build mathematical algorithms in Python on top of that, to synthesize that data.”

Hyperexponential also includes capabilities to support home insurers handling unusual provisions such as riders for high-value items, or loss triangles for estimating and pricing risks, according to Santhirasenan, who adds that this differentiates what his company provides from its competitors.

Hyperexponential grew by signing large enterprises as clients, starting at the end of 2018, and continuing to the present. It has grown to about 120 employees and 20 client companies, with offices in London, New York and Poland. On January 11, the company announced $73 million in Series B financing from Battery Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz and Highland Europe.

As insurance actuaries, Santhirasenan and co-founder Michael Johnson wished they had a product that could use analytics for pricing. They see Hyperexponential as that product, with technologists and insurance professionals collaborating to develop and operate it. “We have a number of bespoke insurance specific components that are actually designed by insurance practitioners,” Santhirasenan said. “If you imagine having an insurance person who was a software engineer and could make the tools for dealing with property models or a variety of industry-specific models, we built those components for our clients to actually compose and put together on the system.”