Capital and underwriting
When capital needs to know whether a technology company is real, they call us.
Advanced technology is unusually easy to demo and unusually hard to verify. A polished pilot video tells an investment committee almost nothing about whether a system will survive contact with a real operator. That gap is where we work.
- Clients
- SGS, ACS, Munich Re
- Environment
- Transactions and underwriting
- Engagement
- Independent technical assessment
- Status
- Ongoing practice
The situation
Investment committees and acquisition teams have sophisticated views on markets and financials and almost no ability to assess whether an autonomous system does what its founders say it does. The technical claims arrive wrapped in language that is difficult to falsify from the outside.
Insurers face a harder version of the same problem. They have to price the risk of a technology whose failure modes are still being discovered.
What we do
We assess the technology against what deployment actually demands. Not whether the demo worked, but whether the operational domain the company claims is the one it can evidence, whether the safety process would survive a regulator, and whether the deployment thesis holds up when you put it in front of the operators who would have to run it.
We have advised more than 40 technology developers, which means when we assess a company we are comparing it against a real distribution rather than against a category of one.
SGS: acquiring digital capability in mining
SGS brought us in alongside their team on the acquisition of TRES60 and X-Analytic, adding advanced digital capability to their mining business in Chile. We provided the specialist consulting and advice behind the technology side of the transaction.
This is the pattern we see repeatedly: an established operator acquiring technical capability it cannot easily assess from the inside, in a domain where the claims are hard to falsify without having deployed the thing yourself.
Munich Re: building the methodology itself
With Munich Re we went further than assessing one company and co-developed the safety verification methodology, building an institutional-grade framework for assessing autonomous vehicle risk inside an underwriting practice.
If you are trying to build a repeatable internal capability rather than buy a single opinion, that is the work.
Why independence matters here
We do not build vehicles. We do not resell them. We hold no position in the companies we assess and take no commission on the outcome. That is the only reason this service has any value at all.
It is also why operators trust our recommendations. We assess the same vendors on both sides of the table, and the assessment does not change based on who is paying.
Anyone can build a demo that works. We are hired to find out what happens on the day it does not.