Scout InsurTech Interview with Nudos

Nudos is a marine insurtech using computer vision to give the industry better visibility into vessel condition. They work with carriers, brokers, and marine surveyors across Latin America to help insurers underwrite marine risk with real data instead of guesswork. Chris Luiz sat down with Juan Ignacio Tabarez and Nicolás Cuore to discuss how Nudos is impacting the industry.

What does your product do?

Nicolás: Right now the product gives a guided inspection for your vessel. The user follows a guided flow, taking photos and/or a short video, and from that we build a structured condition report, a standardized condition score plus a defensible valuation estimate, that goes to the insurance company so they can evaluate the boat and underwrite the premium with real data instead of guesswork. We are already working with marine surveyors too, so if the insurer wants to go deeper on something our analysis flags, we help coordinate getting a surveyor out for a closer look.

How much capital have you raised?

Juan: We built Nudos on our own capital through the first phase, and we've stayed disciplined about it from day one. Right now we're running a structured seed round, and the plan for that capital is simple: strengthen the model, and scale up commercial execution, getting the product in front of more carriers and more of the market.

Was the company born from within or outside of the industry?

Juan: We're a bit of both. I've been a sailor for at least 10 years and have worked with vessels and the marine industry from that side, so in that sense I came from inside the industry. I know firsthand what it's like to care for one of these boats, how much attention an owner puts into it. A boat is one of the few assets people actually give a name to, which says something about how personal it is. But I've been outside the insurance side of things. What's helped close that gap is the people we've met along the way, folks from the industry, including Scout, who opened doors for us to go deeper into how the insurance industry actually works. So we're in between the two, and that mix is part of how we approach this.

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

Nicolás: We're actually working with one insurance company that operates in more than five countries in Latin America, and we're building relationships with other players across the region as we go. We're also working with marketplace and broker partners here in Uruguay. On the expansion side, we're looking at the US and other countries in Latin America, and the strategy is built around partnerships with carriers, brokers, MGAs, and specialty risk players across the industry, not any one deal. In the US that also includes a company that handles claims, which opens up another vertical for us. It's been strong growth since we got going.

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

Juan: What the market keeps telling us, and what I've seen myself, is that insurers are largely pricing risk blind. Marine has been one of the last places technology has reached. Even where inspection data exists, it goes stale fast, a boat's condition changes constantly, it gets used, it gets repaired, it gets hit by weather, and most of what carriers have on file just doesn't reflect that anymore. Two boats in very different condition can end up priced almost the same, because nobody's looking at the actual asset in real time. That's not just a condition problem either, it touches fraud, it touches how claims get validated, it touches environmental exposure. All of it hits the same place: the loss ratio, because on paper it's the same boat, in reality it's a completely different one.

How does Nudos take a unique approach to providing value?

Nicolás: Right now we're gathering structured data from every vessel we inspect, and that data does more than help one insurer make one decision. Over time it helps the whole space understand what's actually happening with these assets, which conditions predict which losses, where the risk really sits, and that kind of knowledge is what lets you prevent problems instead of just pricing around them. It also opens things up for other players, marketplaces that want to sell a boat with a verified condition history attached, for example. Other insurance categories have already been through this same shift, structured asset data becoming the foundation for things like AI-driven damage assessment, trusted history reporting, and specialty valuation for categories the rest of the market had ignored. Marine hasn't had its version of any of that yet. That's the infrastructure we're building, together, with the industry.

What inspired the team to start the company?

Nicolás: I was in proptech before marine, and that's actually how I met Juan. Once we started doing discovery together, we saw the same pattern come up again and again, something gets valued once for insurance and then nobody ever checks again. We started asking that question across different types of assets, and marine stood out fast, and with Juan being a sailor, it made sense to go deep there.

Can you share any goals for the next 12 months?

Nicolás: On the product side, our big focus is pushing the technology further, getting the model to handle more of what a trained surveyor would catch, and expanding into claims so we can support the full lifecycle of a policy, not just the moment of underwriting. That's the real challenge for us right now, building the team and the technology to do that well, not just fast.

Juan: The feedback we've gotten from both the marine industry and the insurance industry has been genuinely encouraging, carriers, brokers, surveyors, owners, people keep telling us this is the kind of thing they've wanted for years, and that feedback is shaping the roadmap in real time. The next 12 months are about proving that out at scale, more carriers live on the platform, the team built out to support that. We already have customers, which is a good start, and we're looking forward to building new partnerships across the industry as we grow.

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