ZestyAI, an AI-powered risk decision platform serving the property and casualty (P&C) insurance sector, has appointed David Friend as chief financial officer and John Ross as senior vice president of client development.
Both executives arrive with extensive backgrounds spanning insurance and enterprise technology, joining as carriers accelerate their uptake of ZestyAI’s platform for underwriting, pricing, and portfolio management.
The appointments coincide with a period of notable commercial progress for the company, which has turned cash flow positive, more than doubled product usage, surpassed 200 regulatory approvals, and brought 26 new carrier customers on board.
Friend joins with over two decades of experience scaling high-growth enterprise software businesses. His most recent role was CFO of Quantum Metric, where he spent five years steering the company through the $100m annual recurring revenue milestone. Before that, he worked as an investor at Bain Capital Ventures, collaborating with founders of category-defining enterprise software companies. In his new role, he will oversee finance, accounting, and corporate development at ZestyAI.
Ross brings close to 20 years of P&C insurance experience, having worked across carriers, InsurTech firms, and data and analytics providers. He joins from LexisNexis Risk Solutions, where he headed the auto and home portfolio and managed the firm’s largest commercial relationships across personal lines insurers. At ZestyAI, he will lead client development, with a focus on helping customers achieve measurable value through precision underwriting, improved rate segmentation, and greater access to reinsurance capital.
ZestyAI is a risk decision intelligence platform used by P&C carriers, reinsurers, brokers, and regulators across the United States. The platform brings together property-level data, predictive AI models, and agentic AI automation to transform how insurers assess, price, and manage risk. Its models, validated against climate science and historical loss data, cover perils including wildfire, severe convective storm, and non-weather water damage.
Over the past year, the company added clients including Applied Underwriters, California Casualty, Lemonade, and Marsh, and deepened existing enterprise relationships with Berkshire Hathaway, the California FAIR Plan, and CSAA, among others.
ZestyAI also launched ZORRO, its agentic AI platform, alongside ZORRO Discover™, which it claims can cut manual regulatory and market research by 95% for underwriting and product teams. It additionally introduced Z-SPARK™, a property-level fire risk model said to be 30 times more accurate than traditional approaches.
ZestyAI founder and CEO Attila Toth said, “David and John are exactly the leaders we need at this stage.
“David has built and scaled the financial foundation of high-growth enterprise software companies, and John has spent his career inside the P&C insurance market helping carriers turn data into better underwriting and portfolio decisions. They strengthen how we operate as a company and how we partner with customers as AI becomes core decision infrastructure across the insurance enterprise.”
Ross said, “What drew me to ZestyAI is a rare combination: a company with the technology to genuinely change this market for the better, and the opportunity to do it in partnership with carriers, reinsurers, and ultimately the consumers they serve.”
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