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 Amrit 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 VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and trust. On Scouting for Growth, she decodes how real growth happens—where capital, collaboration, and courage meet. If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights. And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at [email protected]