Amrit Santhirasenan: Hyperexponential growing organically amid AI revolution

As cloud-based pricing platform Hyperexponential (Hx) approaches its seven year anniversary on 2 November 2024, its co-founder and chief executive Amrit Santhirasenan reflects on the business’ creation story and growth to date – from establishing the insurtech with Michael Johnson in 2017 and hiring 18 staff, to now having 160 employees across three offices and $73m (£57.34m) of funding as at the end of 2023.

At the beginning of his career in 2005, Santhirasenan worked as an actuary for (re)insurance business Catlin, where he was fascinated by the convergence of maths, people and technology. This built upon the areas of interest he had developed during his degree in computer science and software engineering.

In 2013, when Santhirasenan was working as the head of pricing analytics at insurer Tokio Marine Kiln (TMK), he spotted an opportunity to build a pricing and analytics function that leveraged open source technology and the cloud after being frustrated that there was no software available at the time to meet this requirement.

When building Hx, therefore, Santhirasenan set out to build software that modernised pricing analytics in insurance and moved away from old fashioned spreadsheets.

Speaking exclusively to Insurance Times, Santhirasenan says: “In the 2000s, the cloud was still becoming a thing, so people didn’t really know what it could do.

”Hx is a pioneer of cloud-based pricing and analytics software in insurance. I could see that the mindsets of insurance leaders were moving towards wanting technology to be a source of comparative advantage, not just [used for] back office operations.”

Santhirasenan describes Hx as a modern cloud-based pricing platform for actuaries and underwriters, which aims to help them better manage risks.

As the business approaches its seven-year anniversary, Santhirasenan plans to celebrate by bringing the company’s 160 staff together across its London, New York and Warsaw offices.

Santhirasenan continues: “It’s never been such an exciting time to work in pricing. I am optimistic about artificial intelligence (AI). The AI revolution we’re seeing, like all technology revolutions, will drive an increase in productivity.

“Technology has had massive leverage on different parts of society, but insurance is an area where it is still relatively early in modernisation compared to other sectors. It is hard to implement technology at the scale of [some] insurance companies.

“As a startup founder, you always want to believe that these things are possible – but you also need to accept the reality of building a technology company that is servicing such a monumental industry like insurance. 

“I think we’ve made quite a significant impact to the insurance technology scene. It’s been an amazing journey.”

Growing organically

Alongside its growing headcount, Hx announced in January this year that it had raised $73m (£57.34m) in series B funding by the end of 2023.

This backing has helped to fuel organic growth, Santhirasenan explains, helping Hx to scale in order to meet the demand it is seeing from the UK small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) sector, as well as fulfil appetite from abroad in the US.

Around 60% of Hx’s business is currently in the UK and European markets.

Santhirasenan says: “We are growing the business strongly, expanding our core offering and learning from our existing customer base. It’s a much more organic kind of growth.

”The brand in the UK is well established now. When it comes to personal lines and more consumer orientated risk, the UK and US are quite different. That being said, in specialty and commercial risk, there are lots of similarities.

“The area we are particularly interested in [for] the UK is dealing with increasingly complex risks. The state of risks and underwriting in the UK has not stayed still – it’s getting more complicated and data sources are getting richer.”

He adds that there has been market-wide interest in Hx’s technology being used to tackle complex governance, executive oversight and regulatory measures. Therefore, the insurtech will explore how it can support clients with this type of work.

Santhirasenan notes: “Making sure the product is shipshape is a top priority for us. You don’t succeed in insurance unless you meet your customers’ needs.

”The importance of diversification and protection coming from a large balance sheet means that most successful insurance companies are very large. You learn a huge amount about your clients’ needs through the sales process. Sales is about sales, of course, but it is also about learning about the new marketplaces that we are entering.”

Role model

For Santhirasenan, innovation is not just about technology development, however.

Being Sri Lankan, he hopes he can be a role model for other ethnic minority professionals – especially as there has historically been a lack of diverse c-suite executives working in both insurance and insurtech.

He says: “It is important for people who break that ceiling, that [other people] should learn how they did it.”