In 2021, Amara Okafor was running commercial lines underwriting for a mid-size regional carrier in New England. At the end of the year, the carrier's commercial auto combined ratio came in at 117. Nobody was surprised. The submissions that drove the worst losses had visible risk indicators — high-frequency prior carriers, SIC codes with documented adverse loss history, geographic clustering in three CAT-exposed territories — but they had been priced the same way as the clean risks because the underwriting tools didn't distinguish between them.
The tools didn't distinguish because nobody had built a tool that combined ISO loss cost data, the carrier's own historical loss triangles, and external hazard data into a single scoring layer. Vendors sold point solutions — rating engines, claims systems, analytics dashboards — and the actuarial team was expected to stitch them together in Excel.
RiskVert was built to make that stitching unnecessary. We write software for P&C carriers that should have existed in 2015 but didn't because the insurance technology market spent that decade focused on the consumer side, not the carrier side.
We are based in Simsbury, Connecticut — not because of the startup ecosystem, but because that's where the insurance industry actually operates. Our team includes former underwriters, actuaries, and claims professionals who have worked at carriers, not just consulted for them. We know what the daily workflow looks like and what makes carrier technology actually get adopted instead of ignored.
Our first version focused on submission scoring because that's where adverse selection starts. Since then, we've added claims triage, ISO rating integration, and loss ratio forecasting — all in response to what our early carrier partners told us they needed, not what looked good in a pitch deck.