Arbol

Arbol is a New York-headquartered climate-risk group built around parametric insurance, reinsurance, and a proprietary data-and-pricing platform for weather-index products. It was founded in 2018 by Siddhartha ("Sid") Jha — a former interest-rates and commodities quant who spent roughly 13 years in the financial industry before the company began writing parametric weather cover in 2020.

Why this fiche sits in the reinsurance layer (and not rating, and not underwriting-workstation). Arbol is not a module that slots into a carrier's pricing engine, nor is it a submission-intake workstation a team of underwriters signs into. The centre of gravity is capacity placement: Arbol originates parametric climate risk, prices it on its own AI and climate-data stack, and moves it onto paper through a stack of risk-bearing entities it owns or controls — a New York MGA (Arbol Insurance Services), a Bermuda MGU (Arbol Underwriters Ltd., launched November 2021), a London Lloyd's cover holder (Arbol Insurance Services UK, launched November 2023 under Hector Ibarra), and, following the Series B, a wholly-owned US homeowners carrier (Lilypad Insurance) built on the acquisition of Centauri Specialty Insurance Company and Centauri National Insurance Company. That structure is a reinsurance-and-capacity platform, not a software product — hence the classification. A case could be made for "rating" given how central the ML-driven pricing is, but Arbol does not license that pricing engine as a standalone product; it is only available bundled with Arbol capacity.

Funding and capacity. Cumulative disclosed funding is approximately $67M: a $7M Series A in January 2021 led by Mubadala Capital-Ventures, followed by a $60M Series B announced in April 2024 co-led by Giant Ventures and Opera Tech Ventures, with Mubadala Capital continuing as a participant. On the risk side, Arbol disclosed in October 2020 that it had lined up $250M of non-traditional risk capacity (with an ambition to exceed $1B), and by 2023 the platform had transacted over $1B in notional risk producing roughly $250M in gross written premium, up from $2M in 2020.

What the AI does. Arbol's platform combines automated policy structuring, ML-driven pricing, and a climate-data infrastructure that pulls from NOAA, NASA, the European Space Agency, and commercial providers. Early deployments used smart contracts to automate payout triggers on parametric reinsurance deals. The product suite now covers US agriculture (rainfall and temperature indices), renewable energy generation cover (solar irradiance, wind), commercial property, and the September 2025 wildfire product for California, Colorado, Arizona and other Western US states — backed by Somers Syndicate at Lloyd's, with limits up to $10M per residential or commercial property.

MGA-vs-platform duality — the caveat. The same caveat that applies to Shepherd (commercial construction MGU) and Descartes Underwriting (parametric MGA + French ACPR-regulated carrier) applies here: Arbol's "platform" is marketed as a technology, but the commercial relationship that actually ships is capacity, not software. A reader shopping for an underwriting workstation or a climate-risk modelling SaaS should know that Arbol's AI, pricing tools, and climate data infrastructure are only available in the context of buying, ceding to, or co-originating with an Arbol capacity vehicle.

Analyst gap. No Gartner, Celent, Forrester, or Novarica leader-quadrant placement surfaces in public indexing for 2023-2025. Coverage is concentrated in reinsurance and insurtech trade press — Artemis (multiple articles, primary source for capacity and corporate structure), Insurance Journal, Coverager, Insurtech Insights — plus one McKinsey case study on scaling the business.