Scout InsurTech Interview with Carpe Data

Carpe Data is an insurance data research company. They seek to help insurers gain deeper insight into risks and significantly enhance many aspects of the insurance life cycle, including underwriting, claims and book assessment. Michael Fiedel sat with CEO and President, Max Drucker, to learn more about how Carpe Data is impacting the industry.

Who are your clients?

Carpe Data largely works with tier one P&C carriers. Companies like Travelers, Hartford, American Family and Auto-Owners are on our client roster, as well as many other carriers in the top 25.

What does your product do?

We are a data company that delivers unique data products across the spectrum for P&C. Specifically, we identify injury fraud across the entire claim population. We also have a discrete dataset of more than 45 million U.S. businesses used for pricing, underwriting and automation for small commercial.

How much capital have you raised?

We were majority purchased by THL three years ago, so we are now owned by a private equity company. Before that, we had raised $30 million. The valuation at the time of our majority exit in 2022 is not public.

Was the company born from within or outside the industry?

I have spent my entire career in insurance technology. I was one of the founders of Ecoverage, the first online auto insurance carrier in the Bay Area. That company raised funds from E*Trade, Elon and SoftBank before shutting down in 2000. Afterward, I founded a policy admin company called Steel Card, which was acquired by the entity now known as Insurity. So, I have been working in the insurance technology space for most of my career.

What growth metrics have you accomplished over the last 12 months?

We do not share numbers publicly, but I can say we landed three tier one logos and had a major renewal with a top five carrier, along with two other new carrier clients.

Within your domain, what is the current challenge that the industry is facing?

The issue is not the data itself but that insurance carriers have problems that need solving, and data enables those solutions. Large carriers face scale challenges. For example, in auto insurance, automation is possible due to data elements like credit scores and motor vehicle reports. However, in areas like small commercial, those equivalents do not yet exist. We build data products that help carriers know what the business is, where the risks lie and how businesses differ. For instance, we can show that a contractor with a negative online reputation is twice as likely to incur a loss within 12 months as one with a positive reputation.

How does Carpe Data take a unique approach to providing value?

We have built a large dataset over time that enables us to deliver high-signal products with few false positives. For example, in our online injury product, we monitor claimants' online activity to flag inconsistencies with their claims. Our data points come from areas that others do not cover, like internet content, and we distill them into ingestible insights for carriers. This data is not available from other vendors and is not easily reproducible internally by carriers.

What inspired the team to start this company?

Data is exciting because it enables automation in a space full of manual processes. Many decisions are still subjective when they should be objective or automated. Data helps streamline, scale and improve decision-making. It’s rewarding to see our work create tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in impact for customers and help them avoid overpaying on claims.

Can you share any goals for the next 12 months?

Like many others, we are focused on fully leveraging the new AI technologies. There are three areas we are targeting. First, using AI internally to increase productivity and efficiency. Second, reducing the cost of goods sold, so we can deliver more value. Finally, creating products that were previously impossible or uneconomical. These include better, more scalable versions of our current products with improved accuracy and price points.

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