At-Bay is a top-ten US cyber insurer serving SMEs, with $278m of GWP and around 280 staff, and its platform scans insureds’ systems through the life of the policy. It will sit underHartford Steam Boiler, which has been its carrier partner since 2017.
At-Bay was valued at $1.36bn back in 2021 but cyber is now into its fourth straight year of softening.
The strategic play definitely chimes with what we are hearing from clients, as they’re moving towards building the prevention and detection layer, and whether to buy that or build it.
Same logic, different peril.
FM has acquired FortressFire, a San Mateo business combining machine learning with physics-based fire modelling.
FortressFire assesses ignition risk at the individual structure level rather than by region or postcode, working out whether a specific building burns and what specific mitigation stops it.
That turns wildfire from an exclude-or-price call into the kind of engineering problem FM’s 2,000 engineers already solve for every other peril.
With the LA wildfires alone driving $40bn of insured losses last year, a record for the peril, and Swiss Re now calling wildfire the fastest-growing risk on its books at around 12% a year, you can see why the modelling is worth owning outright.
Two carriers. Two weeks. Both deciding that renting the intelligence no longer cuts it.
●Orbital Sentry closed a pre-seed to build continuous geostationary satellite monitoring for early detection and catastrophe model validation
AI moves in properly
Zurich Germany is moving its full core estate onto Guidewire Cloud, taking in personal lines underwriting, billing and claims, with agentic capability and Jutro-based customer experiences in scope.
A carrier replacing its plumbing rather than bolting something onto the side of it.
Keeping with Germany, adesso acquired Berlin’s omni:us.
Founded in 2015, omni:us raised $56.5m across eight rounds and over the years has built models trained on several million annotated claims and more than 80m insurance documents, processing over a million claims a year for Allianz, UNIQA and MS Amlin.
adesso sits at the other end of the scale with €1.3bn of revenue in 2024, 11.1k people and 65 locations, and is folding omni:us into the Agentic Layer of its in|sure Ecosphere platform, which already runs at 50+ insurers.
Two days after announcing the deal, CFO Michael Knopp was on the H1 earnings call selling it to analysts, telling them an insurer using omni:us can set up its processes with 35% efficiency gains and see its claims ratio improve by four percentage points.
Take that as a target rather than a result, and note he also said the business will not contribute to EBITDA until 2027.
●FurtherAI landed in the Microsoft Marketplace, so insurers can deploy through Azure and connect Outlook and SharePoint into submissions, policy comparison, claims and compliance.
I’ve written about these guys before so apologies but it’s a great business.
They observe how work ‘actually happens’ across enterprise applications – every system and exception and judgment call, then builds what it calls a context graph of work and uses that to train agents.
Basically it means the agents learn the process as your best people actually run it, rather than the process as somebody wrote it down or believes it should be.
Skan reports 30-40% average operational savings and over $500m of cumulative customer value, including $100m at a single insurance carrier, across a quarter of the Fortune 50 and seven of the top ten US banks. Some pretty decent numbers there.
Axle is a clearinghouse for insurance verification, normalising fragmented carrier data into a single API, and it now clears over $100bn of coverage a year for more than 4,000 customers.
The shop window is moving
Insurify has put live multi-carrier quotes inside ChatGPT – personalised pricing, payment schedules, coverage questions answered (in-chat) and a route to bind, starting in 11 states.
We covered Insurify and ChatGPT back in February when it moved broker share prices, but that was the announcement and this is it now going live.
If the quote journey starts in a chat window then an aggregator’s shop window is worth a good deal less than it was, which is presumably why EverQuote spent the same fortnight taking a stake in Waniwani, whose entire business is keeping providers discoverable inside agentic channels.
Thurs 1 Oct 2026 3.40pm–4.15pm Innovation Through Growth Stage
Should be a good one.
Public markets, no thanks
You may have caught me and Nigel Walsh talking about this one already on Unfiltered.
Accelerant is going private, with Thoma Bravo paying over $4bn at $20.25 a share, just below the $21 IPO price from July 2025.
The news landed on the same day Accelerant disclosed Q2 revenue of $356.9m against $219.1m a year earlier, net income of $80m against $13.1m, and exchange written premium up 23%.
So net income up roughly sixfold, share price down, fourteen months as a public company.
If you are a specialty insurance platform weighing up a listing, there are some interesting numbers to take into consideration!
I’m not sure what’s going on in the market right now but there is a mountain of M&A. If it is useful, drop me a line and I will happily walk you through what we are seeing.
Sønr continues to build
A quick one on us, for all those new here.
Sønr is a market intelligence and advisory business for insurance, working with 50+ tier-1 insurers and reinsurers globally, helping them see what is coming, work out what it means, and act on it.
Sønr 2.0 is the next iteration of our platform, one we’re hoping to open to the entire insurance ecosystem. It’s in beta at the moment but testing pretty well.
Unprompted, this came in from Pinar Darici at Gen Re, this week. Always a pleasure to read this stuff.
“Workflows are great! And the vast data you built on does show the difference; the responses are significantly cleaner, concise and relevant than any other AI chatbot.”
As many of us are finding out, AI has made research faster for people but sadly without making it reliable, contextual or persistent.
No matter what frontier AI you’re using, what model you’re selecting, or how many tokens you’re smashing through, you’ll only ever get an incomplete answer.
Sønr 2.0 is built on ten years of proprietary insurance data, and it holds onto what you and your team have already worked out, so it gets better the more you use it.
Beta is open. If you would like a look, drop me a line.
ITC Vegas baby
The time is nearly upon us.
The big news, as of yesterday…the ITC Vegas app is officially OPEN.
I am on the Advisory Board once again this year and I’m loving the way these guys manage to update and evolve the show, testing new ideas and formats, and ensuring it remains not only relevant but an absolute must-attend event.
Tues 29 Sept 2026 3.55pm–4.15pm The Modern Underwriter Summit
We’ve also got the legend that is Bill Harris, co-founder and Chief Customer Officer of ITC Vegas, joining the Unfiltered pod in a couple of weeks. Should be a good one.
If you haven’t booked your tickets, drop me a note. I might be able to help.
—
Right, September is lining up to be absolute chaos – in a good way – with travel to more or less every single place in the world. Let’s enjoy the quiet while it lasts.
As always, a big thank you to everyone who subscribes and keeps reading this. It’s madness just how many tens of thousands of people this goes out to these days.
If you think a colleague would get something out of it, do send it on, because it all helps.
For now, big love.
Matt
The world is changing faster than insurance. Sønr exists to close that gap.
Trusted by the world’s leading (re)insurers, brokers and innovators in over 60 countries to track what’s emerging, validate the opportunities worth backing, and act on it.
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