Kalepa, a New York company that builds AI for commercial insurance underwriting, has raised a $75 million Series B at a $470 million valuation. The round was led by Updata Partners, with IA Ventures and Inspired Capital returning from earlier stages. Reuters first reported the funding.
The round lands five years after the company's $14 million Series A in 2021, which Inspired Capital led, and brings total funding to $91 million. Backers listed among the company's angels include former US Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker, Carta CEO Henry Ward, Lead Bank CEO Jacqueline Reses and Gokul Rajaram. Kalepa also hired Garrett Schlesinger, previously at Affirm, as chief technology officer, alongside recruits from Addepar, Palantir and Block.
The product coordinates AI agents across the full underwriting workflow: submission intake, clearance, triage, risk analysis, rating, quoting and portfolio management. Commercial insurance applications arrive by email, portals and APIs, often with conflicting records and handwritten notes attached. Kalepa's system ingests ACORD forms and unstructured documents, extracts risk data and runs consistency checks, linking every extracted claim back to its source record so a reviewer can inspect discrepancies before a quote goes out.
The design philosophy is deliberately supervised. The company describes autonomy as task-specific: agents do the legwork, while human underwriters make the judgment calls, and every step leaves a traceable record. The company calls this Professional Grade AI. On the numbers side, Kalepa says customer count and revenue both tripled over the past year, processed submission volume grew fourfold, insurers see 30% to 60% more premium per underwriter, quote times dropped 58%, quote-to-bind rates doubled and combined ratios improved by 960 basis points. All of those outcomes are company-reported client results, not uniform or independently verified performance claims.
Kalepa was founded in 2018 by Paul Monasterio and Daniel Hillman. Monasterio holds a PhD in nuclear science and engineering from MIT and previously worked at Applied Predictive Technologies, which Mastercard acquired for $600 million in 2015, then at Mastercard and Facebook. The company says it operates in more than 10 countries, serves carriers and managing general agents including W.R. Berkley, Bowhead Specialty and AmRisc, and has been cash-flow positive for more than two years.
The round joins a well-funded competitive field: Federato raised $100 million last November, Sixfold raised $30 million in January, and London's Artificial Labs raised $45 million in February. In a business where regulators and carriers both expect accountability, Kalepa is betting that the winning system is not the most autonomous one, but the one that knows when to hand the decision back to a person.
The new capital will go toward broadening the AI product suite, entering new commercial segments and doubling headcount through 2027, with most of the hiring in engineering, AI and commercial roles. The open question, which the reporting itself notes, is whether carriers will keep paying for supervised automation as fully autonomous underwriting tools mature.
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