Archipelago raised $34 million in new financing from multiple investors, with plans to use the money for further expansion of its operations and technology – a risk data platform with artificial intelligence that digitizes risk for large owners of commercial property.

Scale Venture Partners led the Series B round, which also included earlier investors Canaan Partners, Ignition Partners and Zigg Capital. Principals from Stone Point Capital, along with Prologis Ventures, also participated in the round. Before the new round, it had attracted more than $20 million in venture capital following its August 2020 launch.

[Related: From RMS to Archipelago: Shah’s Second Time Around]

Archipelago, founded by entrepreneur Hemant Shah, plans to use its new cash infusion to further build out new product capabilities, and hire employees in areas including engineering, data science and “customer-facing teams.” Plans are also underway to globalize and expand the focus beyond property owners and insurers in North America, the company said.

Shah, who is also Archipelago’s CEO, said that his company is trying to address accelerating demand for more proactive risk management and efficient insurance markets.

“Large owners of commercial property continue to experience rising premiums, and risk volatility is increasingly driven by climate change and other factors,” Shah said in prepared remarks. “By delivering AI at scale to digitize risk, we can enable more efficient insurance markets and catalyze more resilient commercial properties worldwide.”

Archipelago said more than 330,000 commercial properties with total insured values of $2.3 trillion are currently on Archipelago, figures that are growing weekly, the company asserts. Archipelago’s platform uses machine learning and data verification designed by an internal team of expert structural and risk engineers to digitize and enrich property risk data from a wide range of unstructured source documents, schematics and images. This ensures that all parties within the property and insurance life cycle have trusted access to accurate, high-quality data.

Archipelago said its platform extracts structured and unstructured data from customer-provided evidentiary documents (including readily available spreadsheets, inspection reports and structural schematics) and transforms these documents into information needed by underwriters as part of the annual insurance renewal process. The Archipelago platform further transforms this data into visual dashboards, making it easy for brokers to securely share and market the data across the global insurance market and for underwriters on these programs to efficiently and confidently underwrite and price the risks, the company claims.

Archipelago said it has also expanded the commercial availability of its platform to insurance brokers and insurers. More than 1,000 insurance brokers and underwriters across more than 100 insurers (including CNA) have experienced the platform so far via Archipelago’s customers’ placements, the company said.

Previously, Shah co-founded RMS (Risk Management Solutions), a catastrophe risk modeling firm focused on the global insurance industry. Hemant founded RMS as a graduate student at Stanford University and grew it from zero to a market leader with over 1,200 employees, Archipelago’s announcement noted.

Source: Archipelago