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The financial services company Moody’s announced on Monday that he agreed to acquire Head of Analyticsa geospatial AI startup, for an undisclosed sum.
The deal, which is expected to close in Q1, subject to customary closing conditions, will give Moody’s access to Cape’s geospatial AI analytics technology for insurance underwriting. With the technology, Moody’s plans to create a proprietary database capable of providing “address-specific” risk insights for its insurance clients, said Moody’s CEO Rob Fauber.
“By combining our … risk models with Cape’s AI-powered property risk intelligence, we will provide our clients with the most advanced property risk analytics available in the industry,” Fauber said in a statement, “increasing insights and decision making throughout the insurance. life cycle”.
Cape’s exit comes as the insurance industry ramps up its adoption of AI and predictive analytics technologies. In 2024 survey from Conning, an insurance asset manager, found that 77% of insurers are in some stage of AI implementation, an increase of 16 percentage points from the previous year. For one estimatethe global AI in insurance market will be worth $79.86 billion by 2032.
Suat Gedikli and Ryan Kottenstette founded Mountain View, California-based Cape in 2014. Kottenstette was first a senior engineer at BMW, then a principal at Khosla, while Gedikli was a research engineer at the robotics technology incubator Willow Garage.
Cape allows insurance carriers to optimize their underwriting process by helping them use AI and geospatial imagery to evaluate properties without sending someone to physically inspect them. Through partnerships with geospatial imagery providers, Cape obtains satellite imagery, then applies in-house algorithms to extract structured data, such as whether a property has solar panels and the condition of a roof, and transforms it into a structured information database.
Kottenstette says nearly half of the major property insurers, as well as some of the world’s leading banks, use Cape to inform their pricing and underwriting strategies.
Cape was able to raise $75 million in venture capital from investors including Formation 8, Pivot Investment Partners and State Farm Ventures before its exit, and the company is cash flow positive and profitable, according to Kottenstette.
Kottenstette he said in a blog post who believes that Moody’s, combined with Cape, can bring “a much deeper set” of solutions to carriers’ underwriting workflows and “enable a much more comprehensive view” of risk. Moody’s clients can expect more in-depth, property-specific data, Kottenstette added, including building characteristics, average annual loss estimates, valuations and more.
“Moody’s access to broader and more diverse information gives us the ability to broaden and deepen Cape’s solutions with the inclusion of additional, orthogonal, risk-relevant input data,” Kottenstette wrote. “Moody’s global scale could accelerate our expansion in international markets, (and its) footprint with financial players beyond insurance carriers can accelerate the adoption of Cape’s offers in the mortgage ecosystem and those of other financial actors.
Cape is Moody’s first acquisition in 2025 – and its 23rd acquisition to date, according to to the Tracxn funding database. Cape adds to Moody’s other mergers and acquisitions in property insurance, including Praedicat, a casualty insurance analytics provider, and RMS, a weather and natural disaster risk modeling firm.
