Insurance / Climate Reinsurance · Deep dive

InRisk Labs

The Ahmedabad-based climate insurtech that combined a state-owned agricultural-insurance CRO, a former AIC of India chairman and a data-science founder to build EarthRe, the first locally incorporated reinsurer in India's GIFT City, and raised a $27M Series A at ~$70M post co-led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Northpoint Capital to underwrite parametric extreme-heat, cyclone, monsoon, crop, marine cargo and motor risk across India and the broader Global South.

emerging

The question that decides it: Can EarthRe's parametric triggers — indices for temperature, wind, and rainfall calibrated on Indian and Global South datasets that are historically thin and structurally biased — actually anchor policyholders through basis-risk mismatches on unprecedented climate events, or does the first monsoon-that-doesn't-quite-fit-the-index blow the trust that took two years of underwriting to build, before the balance sheet has scaled enough to matter next to GIC Re, Munich Re or Swiss Re?

My take ★★ Very interesting ★ Interesting − Maybe ✗ Not interesting

Snapshot

InRisk Labs is a two-year-old Ahmedabad climate insurtech that on August 5, 2026 announced a $27M Series A co-led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Northpoint Capital at ~$70M post, per DealStreetAsia and Entrackr. The round landed the same week EarthRe Insurance IFSC Limited — the group’s regulated reinsurance subsidiary — was licensed by IFSCA as the first locally incorporated reinsurer in India’s GIFT City, per Reinsurance News and Business Insurance. The founder line-up is unusually pedigreed: Aavrit Singhal is CEO; Siddesh Ramasubramanian was Chief Risk Officer and Appointed Actuary of Agriculture Insurance Company of India (AIC); Malay Kumar Poddar was AIC’s CMD from December 2019; Shivakumar R S runs data science. The pitch: India will be the most consequential insurance market of the next twenty years, and a tech-led non-life reinsurer inside India’s IFSC can arbitrage the mispricing global reinsurers still carry when they extend developed-market models to Indian perils.

Founding story

InRisk exists because two of India’s most senior agricultural-insurance executives concluded the state had gone as far as it could with indemnity-based crop cover. Poddar joined General Insurance Corporation of India in 1986, moved with the crop unit into AIC in 2003-04, and ran AIC as CMD from December 18, 2019. Ramasubramanian, a Fellow of the Institute of Actuaries of India and the UK, arrived at AIC after appointed-actuary stints at ICICI Lombard and SBI Life; his last pre-InRisk LinkedIn milestone was AIC’s 2021 launch of parametric weather cover for farmers — the wedge InRisk has commercialised privately. Singhal (insurance analytics) and Shivakumar (climate data science) joined as operational and technical founders. Bessemer led a seed on January 14, 2025 and doubled down on the Series A alongside Northpoint Capital, the $155M solo-GP fund launched in 2025 by former Nexus MD Sameer Brij Verma. The combination is hard to reassemble: state-agency incumbency, actuarial credibility with IFSCA and IRDAI, primary-market relationships, and a data-science stack that produces indices those primaries can cite in rate filings. It is the reverse of Kettle’s arc — where Kettle started as an outsider trying to convince incumbents to cede risk to it, InRisk started as the incumbents.

How it works

An EarthRe parametric contract differs from an indemnity policy at every stage. The index is fixed upfront — temperature at a specified station over N days, wind speed at a named cyclone’s landfall, cumulative rainfall over a defined monsoon window, or a satellite-derived vegetation index over a crop pixel. Triggers are calibrated on history: India’s SEWA heat covers, run by ICICI Lombard, start paying at 40 degrees Celsius and step up sharply above 43. The payout is fixed — per-day, landfall lump sum, or linear rainfall-shortfall — and never depends on a loss adjuster. When the index breaches, EarthRe pays: no claim form, no site inspection, no causation dispute. For that to work at reinsurance scale, InRisk’s platform must source and clean the raw data (IMD gridded temperature and rainfall, ISRO satellite imagery, private weather stations, cyclone reanalysis), model joint distributions and climate-change tails, and expose an API a primary can wire into its core system. EarthRe carries the retained tail on treaty, facultative, structured or parametric terms; InRisk sells the modelling stack to primaries who write policies themselves.

Product and business overview

The 15+ parametric SKUs on InRisk’s public surface cluster into four families. Climate perils — extreme-heat covers for outdoor workers, cyclone covers for coastal industry and ports, monsoon-shortfall and monsoon-excess covers for agriculture and business-interruption. Sector weather covers — solar and wind resource-shortfall for renewables, weather cover for hospitality, energy-demand covers tied to unusual seasons. Traditional non-life reinsurance — property, crop, marine cargo and motor lines on treaty and facultative basis under the IFSCA licence. Infrastructure and wage-loss — structured products for state governments and NGOs, like the Nagaland scheme SBI General renewed for three more years in 2024 with InRisk as public partner. The group is deliberately two entities: InRisk Labs holds the technology, modelling and data platform; EarthRe Insurance IFSC Limited is the regulated reinsurer that carries the balance sheet. That split lets InRisk earn platform fees from primaries that do not want to cede to EarthRe, and lets EarthRe take balance-sheet risk on products InRisk designs when the economics justify it.

Business model and pricing

Three revenue streams, none disclosed at unit level. Reinsurance premium on EarthRe’s book, with retained tail booked as underwriting income and retro ceded to global counterparties. The IFSCA framework requires a minimum assigned capital of roughly USD 1.5M and a solvency ratio of at least 150% per Mondaq — floor numbers, not the operating capital a growing book will need. Product-design and platform fees from primaries using InRisk’s API. Structured-product fees on state-government and multilateral covers like Nagaland’s. Take rates on parametric MGA business globally sit in the mid-teens as a percentage of premium; treaty ceding commissions run 20-30%. InRisk has published no rate cards, no average premium per contract, no loss ratios or combined ratios — legitimate at this scale, but the same opacity that makes it hard for an outsider to test underwriting quality.

Traction over time

No disclosed gross written premium, customer count, or loss ratio.

Market analysis

The global parametric insurance market was estimated at roughly $18-22B in 2026 per DataM Intelligence and GMinsights, projected to reach $60-64B by 2035 at 12-13% CAGR. The natural-catastrophe protection gap sat at around $113B globally per DataM’s mid-2026 report, most of it in the Global South. India’s parametric market is projected to grow at 12.9% CAGR through 2033 per Whalesbook; the government began early-stage talks in 2025 about a nationwide climate-linked parametric scheme. Structural forces favour EarthRe: India’s non-life premium has grown near 9.8% annually; GIC Re’s share of Indian reinsurance premium slid from 74.2% in 2019 to 51% in 2023 per Insurance Business Magazine; heat stress alone could shave up to 5.4% off Indian GDP by 2030. The counter-force: most Indian primary insurance is still indemnity-based and price-competed through PSU and bancassurance channels, and Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana — renewed for 2025-26 at INR 69,515 crore — has already locked the largest parametric-adjacent lines to state schemes and their reinsurers.

Competitive intel

Three tiers. Parametric-native MGAs and reinsurers — Kettle, Descartes Underwriting, Arbol, Raincoat, Skyline Partners, Floodbase, FloodFlash. Descartes is the clearest threat with $120M raised in 2022 and a global book already touching Asia; Kettle is the closest architectural analogue; Raincoat is the Global-South comparison LPs will make. Indian primaries writing parametric themselves — ICICI Lombard’s 2023 heat cover with Swiss Re paid roughly $340,000 across 46,000 women in summer 2024; Go Digit is scaling outdoor-worker cover. Both can cede to EarthRe or bypass it. Incumbent reinsurers — GIC Re domestically, Munich Re and Swiss Re globally, with Munich Re and GIC Re displacing Swiss Re on an Indian state parametric cover in 2024 per The Insurer. ADNIC, Santam, Qatar Islamic Insurance and Lloyd’s syndicates now setting up in GIFT City could turn a green-field IFSC advantage into a crowded corridor within three years.

History and evolution

• 1986 — Poddar joins GIC; later moved into the crop-insurance unit that becomes AIC.
• 2003-04 — AIC carved out from GIC; Poddar joins the new entity.
• 2019-12-18 — Poddar becomes CMD of AIC.
• 2021 — AIC launches parametric weather insurance for farmers; Ramasubramanian publicly associated with the launch.
• 2024 — InRisk Labs incorporated in Ahmedabad; partners with SBI General on Nagaland’s parametric scheme.
• 2025-01-14 — Bessemer leads seed round.
• 2026-08-05 — $27M Series A at ~$70M post; EarthRe becomes first locally incorporated reinsurer licensed by IFSCA at GIFT City.

What people say

The case for. Coverage in Reinsurance News, Business Insurance, The Insurer, ImpactAlpha, Inc42, Entrackr, YourStory and DealStreetAsia has been almost uniformly favourable. Bessemer’s memo (under Vishal Gupta) argues India will be the most consequential insurance market of the next twenty years and that InRisk’s team, having underwritten billions in agricultural risk at AIC, is uniquely equipped to build a reinsurer on it. Two hard facts anchor trade press: EarthRe is the first locally incorporated reinsurer in GIFT City, giving it regulatory scarcity new entrants cannot immediately replicate; and the founders’ AIC tenure gives it primary-market relationships Descartes, Kettle and Arbol cannot buy at any price.

The complaints. Basis risk is the whole critique of parametric insurance, and PwC and IAIS papers are explicit that in regions with underdeveloped weather infrastructure — exactly the Global South EarthRe is built for — sparse data yields indices that poorly represent local conditions. Down to Earth and Prayas Energy Group critiques of Indian heat covers make the same point at ground level: workers see triggers pay in some districts and not others during the same heatwave, and political fallout is disproportionate to loss size. AIC itself has a mixed record — delayed indemnity payouts and yield-estimate disputes — that a startup carrying two of its most senior former executives is not shielded from. An IFSCA-licensed reinsurer at the USD 1.5M capital floor is not writing catastrophe treaties at scale next to GIC Re, Munich Re or Swiss Re, and needs to raise more equity — or unlock retro capacity — before it can. No public premium, loss ratio or customer figures are disclosed.

Outlook: the open question

The answer conditions: EarthRe works if its indices track ground-truth losses closely enough that its first material basis-risk mismatch — the monsoon that soaks a district the rainfall gauge missed, the heatwave that kills workers at 42 degrees when the trigger sits at 43 — does not cost it a primary-carrier relationship or a state-scheme contract; if IFSCA lets a startup reinsurer scale retained capacity fast enough to matter next to GIC Re, Munich Re and Swiss Re; and if the group can raise a Series B off a book that has paid claims through a real climate season. It fails if any one of those breaks. The thesis is defensible — India is the largest under-insured climate market, incumbents price it with imported models, and a locally-built parametric reinsurer with an IFSC licence is a real regulator-native wedge. The founder line-up is closer to a state-owned incumbent reincarnated as a startup than to a typical insurtech, which is what the licence and capacity relationships require. But the same asymmetries that make the market attractive make failure modes cheap for competitors. If a single high-visibility heat contract pays in a district that did not need it and skips one that did, the story that carried EarthRe through the licence, the Bessemer partnership and the Business Insurance headline is the same story that turns local politicians and state buyers against it. The horizon is short: monsoons and heatwaves are annual, cyclone seasons semi-annual, and the group will be tested on paid parametric claims well before Series A cash runs out.

How to attack it

The wedge for an attacker is distribution scale plus balance-sheet certainty. InRisk’s advantage is a licence and a founder Rolodex, but the Indian primary market is already partly ceding parametric directly to Swiss Re, Munich Re and GIC Re without an intermediary. A well-funded challenger — Descartes extending its Asian book, Munich Re accelerating its India platform, or a new India-native reinsurer stood up by Reliance General or Bajaj Allianz in the same IFSCA corridor — could compress EarthRe’s edge on four fronts. Price: a larger reinsurer with cheaper capital can quote treaties inside EarthRe’s rates on any line where InRisk’s index is not proprietary, which for standard rainfall and temperature indices is most of them. Index proprietary-ness: if Verisk, RMS, CoreLogic or an Indian challenger like Cropin builds a catalogued library of IFSCA/IRDAI-approved indices for rate filings, InRisk’s modelling moat compresses toward zero. Distribution: ICICI Lombard, Go Digit, HDFC ERGO and Bajaj Allianz each have retail and MSME distribution far beyond EarthRe’s; they could offer parametric products co-underwritten with Swiss Re on existing paper and never cede a rupee. Data control: IMD data is public; ISRO feeds largely public; Skymet could sell exclusivity to a competitor and gate InRisk’s model refresh cycle. Exposed flanks as of August 2026: undisclosed premium and loss ratios, minimum-capital thin at IFSCA’s USD 1.5M floor, dependence on AIC-alumni relationships for primary-market ceding, no US or EU rated paper for retro, and a public product surface (15+ SKUs) broader than a two-year-old team can underwrite with equal rigour. A challenger pairing Munich Re or Swiss Re treaty backing with Reliance/Bajaj-scale distribution and one narrow peril — say, cyclone cover for the Odisha and Andhra industrial belt — could out-execute InRisk inside 18 months.

Adjacent-segment play

The parametric-plus-index-modelling capability generalises three ways. Geography: the exact stack is re-usable across Southeast Asia (Indonesia, Vietnam, Bangladesh), East Africa (Kenya, Nigeria) and the Andean region, all with the same monsoon, cyclone and heat exposure and weaker weather infrastructure than India’s. Raincoat has proved the template in the Caribbean and LatAm; IFSCA’s tax treatment plus DTAA coverage make GIFT City a defensible base for equivalent Global-South expansion. Buyer type: the same indices that price a treaty for a primary can price a direct corporate parametric cover — solar-farm resource shortfall, port-shutdown cyclone cover, hotel weather cover — sold to the corporate risk manager without a primary in the middle. Descartes has demonstrated the corporate-buyer wedge globally; EarthRe could stand up an in-house MGA for large Indian conglomerates and capture underwriting margin without ceding commission leaking out. Value chain: the modelling stack can be repackaged as climate risk analytics sold to banks pricing loan books, sovereigns pricing catastrophe bonds, or corporates disclosing under BRSR/SEBI climate rules. That variant needs no reinsurance balance sheet or IFSCA licence, making it the easiest fast-follow if reinsurance economics take longer than Series A budgets for.

Sources and further reading

• InRisk Labs raises $27 million — ImpactAlpha, August 2026
• InRisk Labs raises $27 million in Series A — The Insurer, August 5, 2026
• EarthRe gets reinsurance licence for GIFT City — Reinsurance News, August 2026
• EarthRe breaks ground as GIFT City’s first local reinsurer — Business Insurance, August 2026
• InRisk Labs Raises $27 Mn — Inc42, August 2026
• Bessemer, Northpoint co-lead — DealStreetAsia, August 2026
• Re-Insurance Framework Of The GIFT-IFSC — Mondaq, 2025
• Basis risk in parametric insurance — PwC Switzerland, 2024
• Munich Re and GIC Re replace Swiss Re — The Insurer, 2024
• GIC Re’s dominance fades — Insurance Business, 2024
• Insurance helped 46,000 women avoid deadly work during heat waves — Business Standard, June 2024
• Malay Kumar Poddar appointed CMD of AIC — Bimabazaar, December 2019