Moody’s agrees to acquire Cape Analytics, which develops geospatial artificial intelligence for insurance providers

Financial services company Moody’s announced Agreed to get it on Monday Cape Analyticsgeospatial AI startup for an undisclosed sum.

The deal, which is expected to close in Q1, will give Moody’s access to Cape’s geospatial AI analytics technology for insurance underwriting, subject to customary closing conditions. Moody’s CEO Rob Fauber said that with the technology, Moody’s plans to create a property database that can deliver “addressable” risk insights for insurance clients.

“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,” said Fauber, “enhancing insights and decision-making across the insurance lifecycle.”

Cape’s release comes as the insurance industry ramps up its adoption of artificial intelligence and predictive analytics technologies. A 2024 request Insurance asset manager Conning found that 77% of insurers are in the process of implementing AI, a 16 percent increase over the previous year. With one to guessThe global AI in insurance market will be worth $79.86 billion by 2032.

Suat Gedikli and Ryan Kottenstette founded Cape in 2014 in Mountain View, California. Kottenstette was previously a senior engineer at BMW, then a director at Khosla, and Gedikli was a research engineer at robotics incubator Willow Garage.

Cape enables insurance carriers to optimize their underwriting process by helping them use artificial intelligence and geographic imagery to value properties without sending someone to physically inspect them. Through partnerships with geographic imagery providers, Cape acquires satellite images, then applies in-house algorithms to extract structured information, such as whether or not a property has solar panels and the condition of the roof, and transform it into a structured property database.

About half of the top property insurers, as well as some of the world’s leading banks, use Cape to inform their pricing and underwriting strategies, Cottenstette claims.

Before exiting, Cape was able to raise $75 million in venture capital from investors including Formation 8, Pivot Investment Partners and State Farm Ventures, and the company is cash flow positive and profitable, according to Kottenstette.

Cottenstette said Moody’s believes that together with Cape, it can bring “deeper solutions” to carriers’ underwriting workflows and “provide a more complete view” of risk. Cottenstette added that Moody’s clients can use building specifications, average annual loss estimates, appraisals and more. can expect more in-depth, property-specific information, including

“Moody’s access to broader, more diverse data enables us to further expand and deepen Cape’s solutions by incorporating additional, orthogonal, risk-related inputs,” said Kottenstette. blog post. “Moody’s global scale can accelerate our expansion into the international market, (and) our footprint with financial stakeholders beyond insurance carriers, the Cape’s mortgage ecosystem and the adoption of offerings from other financial stakeholders.”

Cape is Moody’s first acquisition of 2025 and its 23rd acquisition to date. according to Funding the Tracxn database. Cape adds to Moody’s other property insurance mergers and acquisitions, including Praedicat, a casualty insurance analytics provider, and RMS, a climate and natural catastrophe risk modeling firm.