Scouting for Growth

• Laurna Castillo: How Wildfire Resilience is Rebuilding California

  On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to Laurna Castillo, Senior Vice President of Product at CSAA Insurance Group, a AAA insurer serving millions of customers across the western United States. Laurna has become a leading voice in reimagining how the insurance industry – and entire communities – can build resilience in the face of escalating wildfire risk. On this episode, Laurna will share her journey, lessons learned from the frontlines of growth, and actionable insights for listeners eager to drive meaningful impact in their own ventures. KEY TAKEAWAYS The AAA was originally an automobile association focussed on making cars safer with advocacy for seatbelts, for example. Without seatbelts car insurance would be more expensive making driving less accessible to the average person. It’s the same with wild fire, there a massive quantities of homes being lost every year and if we don’t have these solutions for less homes being burned down by wild fire, it’s going to be less accessible for the average consumer to live in places like California. Knowing where to start was our biggest challenge, but picking a direction and sticking with it, and recognising all the different facets that need progressing, we leant in when we recognised those. We’ve learned that people are overwhelmed. There’s so much information out there, if you speak to your neighbour you might get one thing, if you speak to your local fire-chief you might get another. That was reinforced in our community engagements, as was the fact that trusted voices matter; people are most likely to trust the motivations of people they know rather than insurance companies.  We’ve been leaning into this problem with this mindset for over a decade and it’s becoming more of a strategic focus and imperative for us because of the increase in really large fires that are affecting a lot of properties. One of the most important issues is where to start, in terms of mitigation. The 0-5 foot ignition zone is the single most important factor. Te next is scalability, we need to rally around and give common standards and similar messages, that will help homeowners receive clear, consistent guidance. BEST MOMENTS  ‘Do the next, best, right thing that’s in front of you. If you keep doing that, eventually it builds up into a system of change and collective progress.’  ‘I cannot emphasise enough how important partnerships are to this problem. They extend reach.’ ‘The easiest way to have a wild fire resilient home is to build one, building one that’s not resilient and trying to retrofit it is less optimal and not as easy.’ ‘The single most important thing is clearing flammable material (fences, overhanging trees and bushes) from a 0-5 foot zone from the house.’ ABOUT THE GUESTS Laurna Castillo is a forward-thinking leader and passionate advocate for innovation and sustainable growth. With a dynamic background spanning entrepreneurship, community development, and strategic leadership, Laurna has dedicated her career to empowering organizations and individuals to unlock their full potential. LinkedIn ABOUT THE HOST Sabine is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur. She is the CEO and Managing Partner of Alchemy Crew a venture lab that accelerates the curation, validation, & commercialization of new tech business models. Sabine is renowned within the insurance sector for building some of the most renowned tech startup accelerators around the world working with over 30 corporate insurers, accelerated over 100 startup ventures. Sabine is the co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, a top 50 Women in Tech, a FinTech and InsurTech Influencer, an investor & multi-award winner. Twitter LinkedIn Instagram Facebook  TikTok Email Website This Podcast has been brought to you by Disruptive Media. https://disruptivemedia.co.uk/

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• Yo Kwon: How AI Claim Letters Cut Errors, Costs, and Cycle Times

  On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to Yo Kwon, CEO at Voltaire.Claims. Together, we pull back the curtain on how enterprise operations (and in particular finance and insurance operations) are being reinvented – not tomorrow, but right now. KEY TAKEAWAYS           ·       I was working with my co-founder on Ai technology trying to work out what would be applicable for wider businesses. While we were testing ideas someone was using one of our products to write claims letters. ·       Adjustors don’t enjoy writing claims letter, especially denials, they lean heavily on templates and cheat sheets to figure out the clauses to cite, so small mistakes and big ones can slip though. Voltaire generates each letter from scratch, it doesn’t take shortcuts which removes the room for error.  ·       Litigation alone adds an average of $10,718 per claim in loss adjustment expense, we projects Voltaire can reduce litigated claims by 10% or more through more defensible correspondence. Even a conservative 5% improvement in leakage through clearer letters translates to $320,00 in recovered value.  ·       We include critical guardrails. If an adjustor requests a denial letter but there’s no valid policy exclusion that exists to support the denial, the system returns ‘no relevant policy language was found’. This prevents a wrongful denial or compliance violation before it happens. BEST MOMENTS  ‘Before I started this company I did not think this would be a problem in 2025, and this is a problem because of the complexities of claims.’  ‘Whenever productivity is measured, people will choose speed over compliance, I’d go far as to say most adjustors never actually learn the correct way to write a claims letter.’ ‘Claims managers and adjustors have told us the AI is teaching them things about policies that they’ve never known before.’ ‘Our approach treats compliance as a product feature, not an afterthought.’ ABOUT THE GUESTS Yo Kwon is the Co-Founder and CEO of Voltaire.Claims, where he leads the development of cutting-edge AI solutions that transform insurance correspondence. With deep expertise in artificial intelligence, decentralized systems, and cybersecurity, Yo brings a rigorous technical perspective to one of the industry’s most overlooked but high-impact challenges: claims letter automation. Under his leadership, Voltaire has built a lightweight, API-driven platform that integrates seamlessly with core systems like Guidewire to deliver accurate, regulator-compliant claim letters in seconds. LinkedIn ABOUT THE HOST Sabine is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur. She is the CEO and Managing Partner of Alchemy Crew a venture lab that accelerates the curation, validation, & commercialization of new tech business models. Sabine is renowned within the insurance sector for building some of the most renowned tech startup accelerators around the world working with over 30 corporate insurers, accelerated over 100 startup ventures. Sabine is the co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, a top 50 Women in Tech, a FinTech and InsurTech Influencer, an investor & multi-award winner.   Twitter LinkedIn Instagram Facebook  TikTok Email Website This Podcast has been brought to you by Disruptive Media. https://disruptivemedia.co.uk/

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• Bobbie Shrivastav: Building the Insurance Ops OS - Generative AI Workflows That Cut 70% of Manual Work

  On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to Bobbie Shrivastav, co-founder and CEO of Solvrays about building AI-driven workflows that aim to eliminate 70% of manual back office work with governance, auditability, and with human-in-the-loop controls directly built in. They also talk about what makes vertical AI for insurance defensible and measurable, compressing sales and implementation cycles without cutting corners on risk, change management, and how to augment teams as talent retires while new talent ramps up. KEY TAKEAWAYS When the work comes into an organisation, not everything is digital. Things are still mailed, the first help we provide is extracting the information from those manual sources and place it with the right person in their case management system. That alone eliminates 5-7 touch points. When an agent sends an email we’re able to get a new business application, we’re able to extract the information, we understand that this is a new business applications, and we can take that data and integrate it into the new business solution. Before, someone would have checked an email, gone to the new business application and keyed that in so work could move in. We’ve eliminated that complex new business touch point. 74% of our industry is still tackling legacy. Customers don’t care if you’re still using mainframes, they shouldn’t feel a difference. We’re using agentic AI as a connector to legacy systems, we’re also doing database to database connectors, and for newer systems we’re using APIs. We eliminate a dependency factor and empowered IT to work with new technologies, so they’re not dependent on us. But the business and IT partnership with any project, whether it’s our solution or another, is the key to success. BEST MOMENTS ‘We want to be a ray of hope for the operations staff for back office.’ ‘What makes us superior, from an industry point of view, is that we’ve innovated in this space for the last 10 years, we understand operations intimately.’ ‘Once a signature is signed, our goal is to do one workflow in two weeks, not months or years, weeks.’ ‘Where I’ve seen most anxiety in business and IT is in implementation, it can drain your team. Our goal is: If we can build our orchestration layer the right way you don’t have to be so tense.’ ABOUT THE GUESTS Bobbie Shrivastav is founder and managing principal of Solvrays. Previously, she was co-founder and CEO of Docsmore, where she introduced an interactive, workflow-driven document management solution to optimize operations. She then co-founded Benekiva, where, as COO, she spearheaded initiatives to improve efficiency and customer engagement in life insurance. She co-hosts the Insurance Sync podcast with Laurel Jordan, where they explore industry trends and innovations. She is co-author of the book series "Momentum: Makers and Builders" with Renu Ann Joseph. LinkedIn ABOUT THE HOST Sabine is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur. She is the CEO and Managing Partner of Alchemy Crew a venture lab that accelerates the curation, validation, & commercialization of new tech business models. Sabine is renowned within the insurance sector for building some of the most renowned tech startup accelerators around the world working with over 30 corporate insurers, accelerated over 100 startup ventures. Sabine is the co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, a top 50 Women in Tech, a FinTech and InsurTech Influencer, an investor & multi-award winner. Twitter LinkedIn Instagram Facebook  TikTok Email Website This Podcast has been brought to you by Disruptive Media. https://disruptivemedia.co.uk/

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• Amrit Santhirasenan: Talks Agentic Underwriting… From Theory to Enterprise Transformation

  On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to Amit Santhirasenan, co-founder and CEO of hyperexponential, an actuary and software engineer who has built the AI native pricing and underwriting platform used by leading specialty carriers. In this episode we cover how to turn messy submissions into structured signals your pricing model can trust – without hiring an army, multi agent architectures, the agentic AI mesh, and the human in the loop controls executives need for auditability and speed, and where agentic underwriting is ready today (and where it isn’t), plus the metrics executives should track—cycle time, hit ratio, and loss ratio uplift. KEY TAKEAWAYS Email submissions were a luxury at the start of my career! What’s been so exciting for me, as a self-professed nerd, is the pace at which the capabilities of core models have got so good that even 6 months ago was a whole product’s capability and feature set is now within the gift of Gemini or GPT5. If you’re an underwriter filling out a spreadsheet/renew model, in 2025 you need to be working with hx underwriting , actuary or agent inside a renew model to have your paired partner helping you get to the best result. Why can’t you have deep risk research on every single risk? Why can’t you say: Tell me the most important characteristics in the world that you can tell me about the top 3 exposures? No human can do this work, the cost/benefit trade off there isn’t economic, but you can run an OpenAI deep risk API call to do that on every single risk you underwrite today. We do it for you, it’s what we do. All of a sudden it’s dramatically easier to bring that level of differentiation and specialism in the way that great underwriting has always been done to every single risk you want to touch. BEST MOMENTS ‘You won’t see that many places with a $7 trillion contribution to GDP, with such a small number of companies and people responsible for this.’ ‘We demonstrated the first API machine vision algorithm in the market in 2017, now kids coming out of university are doing that as toy projects before they get to our clients.’ ‘You can have an army of digital agents helping you now, all for $20 per month!’ ‘Generative AI models have unlocked the ability to pull data so quickly out of the information required for underwrite that you can put a very quick red/amber/green status on risks, several orders of magnitude greater than ever before.’ ABOUT THE GUESTS Amit Santhirasenan is the Co-founder and CEO of Hyperexponential (hx), the AI native pricing and underwriting platform for P&C insurers. Under his leadership, hx Renew has become known for delivering executive level outcomes: ~50% faster submission to bind, 10× faster model build and deployment, and a platform that supports $45bn+ in GWP for 20+ enterprise customers worldwide. A qualified actuary and computer scientist, Amrit previously spent over a decade in the London Market. He served as Head of Pricing & Analytics at Tokio Marine Kiln, building the managing agent’s first technical pricing team to support ~£1.5bn GWP, and earlier held actuarial roles at Catlin (including standing up the Canadian actuarial function). ABOUT THE HOST Sabine is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur. She is the CEO and Managing Partner of Alchemy Crew a venture lab that accelerates the curation, validation, & commercialization of new tech business models. Sabine is renowned within the insurance sector for building some of the most renowned tech startup accelerators around the world working with over 30 corporate insurers, accelerated over 100 startup ventures. Sabine is the co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, a top 50 Women in Tech, a FinTech and InsurTech Influencer, an investor & multi-award winner. Twitter LinkedIn Instagram Facebook TikTok Email Website This Podcast has been brought to you by Disruptive Media. https://disruptivemedia.co.uk/

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• Will Ross: The Federato Playbook — RiskOps, Appetite, and Winnability for Profitable Growth

  On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to Will Ross, Co-Founder & CEO of Federato, and if you’re an underwriting transformation leader—drowning in Excel, stale pilots, and disconnected data sources—this episode is for you. Will Ross isn’t here to sell you hype. He’s here to show what it looks like when AI actually delivers: faster quotes, better decisions, happier underwriters, and measurable results before the next board meeting. KEY TAKEAWAYS Thinking back to when Amazon released the Echo with Alexa and a bunch of us bought them and took them apart to figure out how it worked reminds me of how Wild West the early days of AI was a decade and a half ago. Now any undergraduate student taking computer science will have some exposure to AI. One of the first things they might learn is how to do simple tasks like that on very little computational resource. I love jumping into our products like that to understand how they work. Break down what AI means: There’s an idea of intelligence or grasping a concept or knowledge, then there’s artificial – doing something in place of a human. You can take it a step further and look at ‘generative’ – generating a thing, or predictive – predicting a thing, agentic – giving it agency and allowing it to complete a task.  What is it that humans do today and, theoretically, what could humans do if they had unlimited time to do their jobs? For underwriters, the process is similar across many line of business: you analyse an exposure, loss history and loss control to come up with a rate perspective, etc. Where can AI systems interact with that process? BEST MOMENTS ‘One of the things I think is really scary with AI today is its perpetuation of news cycles and how fast it spreads.’  ‘No matter how sceptical people are, the vast majority of people are already using these technologies to do their jobs. By bringing them into the room, making them aware of what this technology does, and letting the interact with it, that’s a powerful thing.’ ‘There are going to be jobs that change, but we shouldn’t think about it as AI replacing our jobs, we should think about it as someone using AI to do our job who will replace us.’ ‘What we call AI today will change and change again because it always has; Deep Blue used to be called AI and is now called a chess simulator.’ ABOUT THE GUESTS William Ross is a product and operations leader obsessed with solving the toughest problems in insurance with a mix of pragmatism, speed, and machine learning. As a core member of the Federato leadership team, Will focuses on one mission: turning underwriting from a slow, manual grind into a dynamic, data-driven advantage. At Federato, Will is helping specialty and commercial carriers build resilience and growth into their underwriting operations, showing chief underwriting and transformation officers that AI doesn’t need to be another failed pilot—it can be the competitive edge that secures market share today. LinkedIn ABOUT THE HOST Sabine is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur. She is the CEO and Managing Partner of Alchemy Crew a venture lab that accelerates the curation, validation, & commercialization of new tech business models. Sabine is renowned within the insurance sector for building some of the most renowned tech startup accelerators around the world working with over 30 corporate insurers, accelerated over 100 startup ventures. Sabine is the co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, a top 50 Women in Tech, a FinTech and InsurTech Influencer, an investor & multi-award winner. Twitter LinkedIn Instagram Facebook  TikTok Email Website This Podcast has been brought to you by Disruptive Media. https://disruptivemedia.co.uk/

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