A familiar pattern has taken hold in global insurance markets: disasters strike, losses mount, and the gap between what's covered and what's actually lost grows wider. In 2025 alone, insured catastrophe losses hit $107 billion worldwide, according to Swiss Re Institute. The catch? Nearly half of all economic losses from these events went uninsured entirely.
It's precisely this widening protection gap that InRisk Labs is betting on—though not in the traditional sense. The Ahmedabad-based startup, which announced seed funding from Bessemer Venture Partners in January 2025, isn't building yet another insurance carrier. Instead, it's constructing the infrastructure layer that could allow parametric insurance—policies that pay out automatically when specific triggers are met—to scale beyond its current niche.
The founding team brings a certain credibility to the effort. Malay Poddar, InRisk's leader, previously chaired the Agriculture Insurance Company of India, the state-backed entity that underwrites much of the country's crop coverage. Alongside him is Siddesh Ramasubramanian, AIC's former Chief Risk Officer and Chief Actuary—not exactly the profile of typical first-time founders chasing consumer apps. RS Shivakumar handles data science and machine learning, while Aavrit Singhal manages insurance product and marketing.
Their thesis, backed by Bessemer partners Vishal Gupta, Anurag Begwani, and Vatsalya Tandon, rests on a straightforward premise: skip the loss adjusters entirely. When a predefined weather event occurs—say, rainfall drops below a certain threshold or wind speeds exceed a particular level—payouts trigger automatically, no claims process required. In theory, at least, this eliminates the friction and expense that make traditional catastrophe coverage so cumbersome.
Beyond the Fields
Perhaps more ambitious than the team's pedigree is the scope of what InRisk is attempting to build. Despite roots in agricultural insurance, the platform spans an almost dizzying array of verticals: crop and livestock coverage, yes, but also renewable energy productivity guarantees, logistics disruption policies, heat and cold wage protection, market volatility instruments, and infrastructure interruption coverage.
The technical backbone pulls from institutional climate datasets—India's Meteorological Department, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts' ERA5 reanalysis data, NASA and ESA satellite feeds. Recent company blog posts, published through early 2026, wade into the weeds of basis risk mitigation and gridded climate dataset resolution. One February 2026 entry explores how higher-resolution data can reduce the mismatch between actual losses and parametric triggers, a persistent headache in index insurance design.
Under the hood, the platform combines AI-driven dynamic pricing, real-time monitoring APIs for carrier partners, and blockchain smart contracts for automated settlement. A sample delivery and logistics policy on the company's site, for instance, uses ERA5-Land precipitation triggers with grid-point mapping and tiered payouts based on rainfall deviation—the kind of technical specificity that suggests the team has thought deeply about implementation, not just pitch decks.
The GIFT City Question
InRisk lists its headquarters in Ahmedabad, though the broader metro area includes GIFT City in neighboring Gandhinagar—India's answer to Dubai's financial free zones. The company site doesn't specify a GIFT City address, but the location has become increasingly relevant for parametric and alternative capital structures in India.
The numbers tell part of the story. GIFT City's insurance sector saw gross premiums quadruple to $648.68 million in fiscal 2025-26, according to Business Standard, with the number of Insurance Offices doubling to 36 as of March 31, 2026. International reinsurers, including Lloyd's market participants, have expanded their presence or expressed interest, with parametric products among the targeted areas.
Policy frameworks around IFSCA reinsurance sidecars and standardized parametric reporting suggest infrastructure is being built for alternative capital flows. Yet no direct InRisk regulatory filings or authorizations appear in publicly available GIFT City disclosures—at least not yet.
Heat Waves and Missing Details
Beyond commercial product development, the team has engaged in advocacy work that hints at broader ambitions. In March 2025, Poddar contributed to AIDMI's South Asia Disasters publication, outlining parametric insurance structures for extreme heat wage protection in India. It's a use case that gained attention as climate extremes intensified across the subcontinent—the kind of politically resonant application that could open doors beyond purely commercial markets.
That same publication referenced SEWA's experience with parametric heat risk products, indicating pilot interest in the space. Still, InRisk's public materials remain notably vague on specifics. The company mentions partnerships with insurers and reinsurers but doesn't name them. Capacity commitments? Undisclosed.
Capital Needs and Open Questions
The parametric insurance market has attracted growing institutional attention. Descartes Underwriting launched up to $140 million in parametric protection for data centers in January 2026 and later reported reinsurance as one of its fastest-growing lines. Arbol Underwriters positions parametric reinsurance alongside AI and machine learning underwriting tools, illustrating the sector's capital appetite.
For InRisk, the infrastructure buildout ahead—dataset licensing, API development, actuarial modeling, carrier integration—demands sustained capital well beyond a seed round. Bessemer's portfolio page indicates the partnership began in 2024, with the company founded in 2023. The investment note did not disclose the seed amount, leaving the funding runway unclear.
The platform's stated ambitions span multiple insurance verticals and geographies, a scope that typically requires significant technical and go-to-market investment before unit economics become visible. Will InRisk layer capacity directly, acting as an MGA or fronting carrier? Or operate purely as infrastructure-as-a-service for established carriers? Perhaps some hybrid model emerges. The company hasn't said.
What's certain is this: the protection gap isn't shrinking on its own, and traditional insurance models haven't solved it. Whether AI-powered parametric infrastructure proves to be the answer—or just another promising idea that struggles to scale—remains an open question. For now, at least, InRisk has backing from a name-brand investor and founders who've navigated the complexities of agricultural insurance at scale. That's more than most seed-stage infrastructure plays can claim.
