Dr. Atzberger will lead the modeling, data and research infrastructure
beneath Arbol's specialty risk business to expand range of coverage.
Arbol, the AI-native insurer, today appointed Dr. Clement
Atzberger to the role of Chief Scientist and launched its Innovation Unit under his direction. The
unit will lead the development of foundational modeling, data and underwriting research that will
act as a foundational intelligence layer beneath Arbol's specialty risk products, expanding the
range of risks Arbol can price and write.
The Arbol Innovation Unit, led by Dr. Atzberger in his role as Chief Scientist, will support
underwriting across Arbol's specialty lines, including agriculture, energy, wildfire and flood –
closing protection gaps for difficult to price risks. With a particular focus on agriculture initially,
Dr. Atzberger will drive advanced modeling that can support increased weather and yield
protection products that cover gaps standard insurance policies leave open, or where
businesses currently face tedious hurdles around claims settlement processes.
Arbol builds catastrophe models and prices fourteen perils on models developed in-house, while
most insurers continue to price catastrophe risk on models licensed from outside vendors. The
primary perils include yield, flood and wildfire, calibrated against years of live underwriting
outcomes. With the launch of the Innovation Unit, Arbol connects its models, the data pipelines
that maintain model accuracy, and the underwriting research that connects model output to
pricing and contract terms.
Atzberger is a remote sensing scientist with over three decades of experiences leading research
initiatives. As part of a team of scientists, Dr. Atzberger was instrumental in producing
TESSERA, a data model that converts raw radar and optical satellite time series into AI-ready
representations of the status of a land surface. This data can be used to show how land
changes over time at 10-meter resolution globally, and enables insurers to understand and price
climate risk with greater clarity, as well as provides critical data for climate researchers, farmers,
carbon and restoration projects, and developers to turn specialized, resource-intensive
processes into easily accessible data and information. Additional information around the launch
of TESSERA from dClimate – the climate data infrastructure used by Arbol - and Amazon Web
Services can be read here.
"In academia, you are usually done with a model once it is accurate enough to publish," said
Atzberger. "Insurance demands more, because someone has to be willing to pay a claim on
what the data says, and that is a big part of why I came here. Many of the risks Arbol writes are
ones other carriers decline because the data they have was never good enough to price on. The
work of our unit is to keep improving the models and the data behind underwriting decisions, so
that more of what gets declined today becomes something we can write."
"Foundation models are becoming widely available, and we were glad to help make TESSERA
one of them," said Sid Jha, founder and CEO of Arbol. "With our team of leading quants,
scientists and engineers, led by Dr. Atzberger, we are able to calibrate models against real
underwriting outcomes, closing critical coverage gaps and pricing climate risk with greater
accuracy and efficiency than before.
About Arbol
Arbol is a vertically integrated insurer that underwrites and prices risk, and provides the capacity
and reinsurance solutions behind it. This is done across markets exposed to drought, flood,
wildfire, storm wind and other weather perils. Founded in 2018 and headquartered in New York,
Arbol runs a licensed insurer, a reinsurance platform and an owned agency network on the
same proprietary models and operating core, connecting customers directly to the capital that
stands behind their coverage. It underwrites primary property and casualty risk through Lilypad,
its admitted carrier licensed in Florida, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina,
North Carolina, Hawaii and Virginia, and specialty risk across property, agriculture and energy.
Arbol prices fourteen perils on models built in-house, is licensed in all 50 states and writes in
more than 15 countries.
