For me, it’s been mostly Sønr 2.0. More building. More testing. More learning just where the value truly lies for our beta users. It is starting to feel very real. And very exciting.
I’ve also been planning next year’s CEO conference, with the iFHP exploring new futures with a well known VC crew, and there’s a new client announcement coming soon. Another tier-one global carrier…when the paperwork gods permit 🙏
Right. Let’s get into it.
Concrete, cars and a corgi
Marsh launched Stratus on 26th August, a property insurance exchange offering up to $10bn of capacity on a single placement for operational digital infrastructure, covering the global exposures of US-domiciled companies.
Thirty traditional and alternative capital providers sit on it, each evaluating every risk individually.
It extends Nimbus, their data centre construction facility from last summer, so there’s now a route from the building site through to a running asset. Property first, with inland marine, cyber and casualty to follow.
Then a week later Verisk released a US data centre exposure database covering more than 2,500 facilities, down to rooftop-level geocoding, building footprints and operational attributes.
Industry estimates put global data centre insurance premium at around $10bn this year, heading for $23bn by 2030.
Six months ago you couldn’t place this stuff properly. Now we’ve got capacity and the data to underwrite it. The world is moving fast. Well, some parts of it are!
Physical AI has also appeared in good old London Town.
Uber and Wayve launched London’s first self-driving taxi service yesterday morning, a small fleet of Ford Mustang Mach-Es running Wayve’s technology, bookable through the app. There’s still a person behind the wheel – let’s see how long it takes to get shot of them.
I always liked the great quote by Uber’s co-founder Travis Kalanick back in 2014: ‘“The reason Uber could be expensive is you’re paying for the other dude in the car.”
Waymo is expected to follow in London by Christmas and has said it won’t bother with a safety driver at all.
And while most people are busy building one layer, Corgi has been collecting them.
An admitted carrier on 26th August. A trucking programme with Trucker Path the day after, underwritten on opted-in route-planning data from an app 1.2 million drivers already use, aimed at fleets of under ten trucks.
Then Corgi Re on 2nd September – a reinsurance platform selling capacity back to other insurers.
Note: this image has nothing to do with the Corgi business. Other than it features a Corgi. And a cute non Corgi. I just couldn’t find anything better.
So that’s a carrier, a reinsurance arm, a proprietary distribution channel, and the risk retention groups and MGAs they already had.
I’ve gone back and forth on this one. The pace is genuinely brilliant and I want it to work. They can afford the ambition…but they were founded in 2024.
Two years old, and every layer they add is BIG. A carrier means regulated capital and reserving. Reinsurance means somebody else’s balance sheet trusting your numbers. And all in a market built on relationships measured in decades.
Six to twelve months should tell us. Or at least tell us more.
The user interface is shifting
I’m sure you’ll have seen/heard this one – Salesforce and Anthropic announcing Claudeforce.
Claude becomes the default reasoning model across Agentforce and Slack. And Salesforce arrives inside Claude as a plugin with 37 prebuilt sales skills, so people can query and update live CRM records without opening Salesforce at all.
Interestingly it’s billed on consumption rather than per seat, which is the bit that changes the business model.
Marc Benioff, Salesforce’s co-founder and chief executive, summed it up as the UI being the AI.
Mapping that back to our world of insurance, Homeprotect, part of Avantia Group, implemented WebMCP, which lets AI agents interact directly with parts of the customer journey rather than scraping their way through it.
Live on the home risk calculator, with more journeys to follow.
ManyPets went the other way, launching a pet insurance plugin in ChatGPT, with customers getting an indicative lifetime quote in the conversation before moving across to buy.
They’re calling it a first for UK pet insurance.
Two different plays. ManyPets heading to where the customers already are. Homeprotect replumbing so the agents can come to it.
Twenty programmes, one platform
Novacore, an independent specialty MGA, has picked hyperexponential to run pricing across all twenty of its programmes.
I’ve a lot of time for these guys and really think hx has quietly become one of the more successful players built out of London.
Around $45bn of GWP now flows through hx Renew annually across forty-odd insurers, Aviva and Conduit Re among them. It lets actuaries build in Python with proper governance and audit wrapped around it, instead of handing them a locked vendor rater or leaving them in a spreadsheet.
They’ve since repositioned around agents for underwriting work, which tells you where they think this goes.
Aviva twice, and a parametric payout
Aviva’s Global Risk Management Solutions team has given its consultants access to 3MotionAi, developed with health and safety specialists Cardinus.
Video footage of people doing their jobs gets analysed for posture, movement, repetition, force and duration, surfacing musculoskeletal risks a conventional assessment misses. Another step towards a preventive model.
And if that wasn’t interesting enough, it’s worth noting the tech started life in sports performance. Fact.
They – being Aviva – also went in again on diagnostics this week.
Scan.com, Britain’s largest private medical imaging business, raised $220m with Aviva Ventures as one of the investors. They also co-led their $12m Series A years ago.
The model is a single API into imaging capacity, using spare slots at private providers so patients get scanned in days rather than weeks at a price they can see up front.
Revenue has doubled to a run rate above $165m, and they’re talking to the London Stock Exchange about a listing.
Prevention of an entirely different kind over in Hawaii. This one parametric.
Hurricane Lala hit over the weekend of 22nd August – the first direct strike on the islands since 1992. Winds of 65 knots triggered a parametric coral reef policy for the first time since it was bought in 2022.
WTW built the concept, Munich Re underwrites it, the Howden Foundation has helped with premiums.
$200,000 goes to the Hawaii Emergency Reef Restoration Network to rescue and reattach damaged coral.
Fast money, agreed purpose, immediate response. It worked.
Singapore. If you’re in town?
I’m heading out to Singapore in a couple of weeks.
I clocked IIC Asia last year, didn’t make it out, but didn’t want to miss it twice. Better still, we’re partnering with them.
Sønr will be on site running a series of interviews for our Beyond Boundaries series, with a Spotlight on Asia to follow. Eight speakers confirmed so far and more are being lined up.
Root and Carvana have extended their agreement to August 2028, with more than 200,000 policies now sold through a three-click add-on during vehicle purchase.
Coverdash has embedded commercial cover into Lumber, a construction workforce platform, including pay-as-you-go workers’ comp aligned to payroll.
Obie has joined RentSpree, putting landlord cover inside the leasing workflow.
All good. And there’s plenty of more room to play, according to Cover Genius, who surveyed nearly 1,400 consumers on embedded protection:
●87% weigh what could go wrong when they book travel or buy something significant
●75% would buy more if payouts were automatic, the strongest single driver in the study
●Only 30% were actually offered protection at checkout
●79% were happy with it the last time they did buy
●76% would switch travel platform if cover came as a default loyalty benefit
●Opposition to bundled cover sits at 3%
Embedded isn’t going anywhere in a hurry.
Capital finds the pipes
The big news on Aon is its acquisition of USI for $17bn in cash. Nice.
Randomly we were in talks with Aon to buy Sønr just before we launched, back in 2016. That was a strange set of conversations. It also wasn’t for $17bn in cash. Sadly.
Back to USI – the tenth-largest US broker with around $3bn of revenue, 10,500 people and close to 200 offices.
Aon also paid about $13bn for NFP in 2024. So that’s roughly $30bn spent buying the American middle market in a little over two years.
And one heading the other way is Bamboo Insurance, which has filed its S-1 on the NYSE.
Bamboo describes itself as ‘underwriting-first and capital-light, running data science, analytics, underwriting and claims in-house while sitting on a diversified panel of capacity providers’.
Unfiltered with Matt & Nige
If you’ve not come across it, Nigel Walsh and I record a weekly podcast.
We’re still finding our feet, evolving the format but I reckon we’re getting somewhere. No real agenda other than what’s going on in the insurance innovation space. And in our lives.
Bad calls in insurance almost never get made in doubt. They get made with total confidence, off an incomplete picture, by clever people who had no reason to think anything was missing.
Ten years of building insight and intelligence. Six million companies tracked 24/7. Clients across 60+ countries and a deep understanding of what’s important to them. Plus a research and advisory team out in the market every single day.
50+ tier-one carriers use us. And so do reinsurers, brokers, consultants, investors and a good number of startups.
If any of that sounds useful, drop me a line. I’d genuinely love a conversation. 2027 is shaping up to be an incredibly big and exciting year and I’d welcome you to be part of it.
–
Right, that is SøNws written.
If you’re heading to IIC in Singapore or ITC Vegas, give me a shout.
Next week it’s the Dolomites for me. I’m heading to To The Peak which looks extraordinary. Generali is one of the sponsors. I’m looking forward to this one very much.
For now, big love. Have a great weekend.
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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