Carpe, a company that turns online data and public records into decision-ready intelligence for insurers, has introduced the Minerva Reasoning Engine, a new AI-native underwriting tool built for small commercial carriers.
The system is designed to translate a carrier’s appetite for small commercial business into named, testable rules, allowing it to produce evidence-backed recommendations to quote, decline or refer a given submission.
It does this within a single workflow that identifies the business in question, enriches its record with additional data, applies the carrier’s rules against Carpe’s live intelligence, and delivers a reasoning path that shows how each conclusion was reached.
Small commercial underwriters have long grappled with balancing the time spent researching a prospective policyholder against the profit that policy might generate. Getting that balance right calls for both speed and precision, yet many carriers remain constrained by manual research processes, fragmented data sources and appetite rules that get applied unevenly.
Carpe built Minerva to address these constraints directly, enabling carriers to apply consistent logic to submissions arriving through any distribution channel, whilst still leaving underwriters free to apply their own judgement to the risks that need it most.
According to Carpe, the tool can cut the number of underwriting touches required for straightforward risks by as much as a quarter, automating much of that workflow. It can also save between 30 and 45 minutes per submission by substituting manual research with intelligence that is already prepared for a decision.
Minerva is capable of assessing more than 200 characteristics of a business to determine whether it matches a carrier’s growth objectives, and it can apply and adjust appetite rules across a database of more than 50 million US business profiles, backed by sourced evidence and adjustable through plain-language instructions whenever appetite needs change.
Carpe chief executive officer Max Drucker said, “Carriers need better decisions from the data already available to them. We’ve spent more than a decade building exceptional commercial intelligence, and the Minerva Reasoning Engine gives carriers the reasoning they need to expand capacity while keeping underwriting judgment focused on the risks that deserve it. That creates room to grow the book with greater control over both loss and expense performance.”
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