In this edition of IKH Executive Insights, we speak with Rosina Smith, UK Regional Director at Sixfold, where she works with insurers to adopt AI-powered underwriting technology. She began her career at Allianz before moving into insurtech, including a senior role at McKenzie Intelligence Services, bringing together underwriting expertise and AI innovation.

Sixfold recently raised US$30 million in a Series B round to build the ‘AI Underwriter’. What strategic priorities will this funding support, and how does it advance your longer-term vision for underwriting transformation?

This funding is a signal that the market has validated what we’re building. The capital goes toward three things: expanding our research and engineering teams to deepen our autonomous agent capabilities, broadening data integrations, and scaling our commercial operations to meet growing demand across North America, Europe, Latin America, and Australia. The longer-term vision hasn’t changed; we’re building an AI brain that runs the manual aspects of underwriting, so that underwriters can focus entirely on strategy.

Rather than replacing underwriters, Sixfold positions its technology as an AI assistant embedded directly into existing workflows. Why was this approach important to your product strategy, and what impact have you seen on adoption and day-to-day underwriting efficiency?

Frankly, it was the only approach that made sense if you actually want adoption at scale. Underwriters aren’t going to abandon the tools they know – nor should they. We built Sixfold to work inside existing workbenches and policy administration systems, with near-zero disruption to how teams operate. The results speak for themselves: Zurich North America rolled this out to over 200 underwriters and is saving up to two hours per submission. Skyward Specialty deployed it across 11 teams and cut quote response times by 35% on average. That kind of impact doesn’t happen if you’re asking people to change everything about how they work.

Underwriting remains a highly judgment-driven discipline. How does Sixfold ensure its AI enhances human decision-making while preserving accountability, especially in complex or high-risk cases?

The design principle is simple: AI handles the operational heavy lifting, humans own the judgement. Our brain processes submissions, extracts risk data, surfaces key risk drivers, and presents everything in a consistent, structured way, so that by the time an underwriter is making a decision, they have everything they need in front of them, not buried in documents. In complex or high-risk cases, that’s even more valuable. You want the underwriter focused on the nuanced call, not spending two hours pulling together information.

Trust and transparency are critical when applying AI to underwriting decisions. How does Sixfold approach explainability and governance so underwriters can clearly understand, validate, and stand behind AI-driven insights?

Transparency isn’t a feature for us, it’s foundational. Every insight our platform surfaces is traceable back to the source. Underwriters can see exactly where a risk flag came from, the data that drove it, and why it surfaced. That’s what allows them to validate, push back on it if needed, and ultimately sign off with confidence. We also build to each insurer’s own underwriting guidelines, so the AI isn’t operating from some generic ruleset but instead it’s operating within the carrier’s own framework. That matters enormously for governance and for regulatory comfort.

With plans to expand across Europe, Latin America, and Australia, how is Sixfold adapting its platform to different regulatory environments, data standards, and underwriting practices while maintaining consistency at scale?

We’re already live across North America, the UK, Europe, Latin America, and Australia. We adapt to each carrier's guidelines, data standards, and local practices. What stays consistent is the underlying capability and the quality of output. We’re also partnering with the platforms
and systems used across different territories and lines of business, allowing the Sixfold brain to be embedded seamlessly into existing workflows, wherever businesses are focused.