AI-driven commercial insurance platform Corvus Insurance has started the year by announcing its plans to expand further into Europe and the UK in the coming year – and by laying off close to 15% of its workforce, a move that immediately drew a storm of comments and questions from the insurance community.
Corvus CEO Madhu Tadikonda, who was appointed just last year in replacement of founding CEO Philip Edmundson, said that the move had been a tough decision to make, but made sense for the business.
“2022 was a strong year for Corvus as we grew our cyber premiums by 80% while maintaining an industry-leading loss ratio below 40%,” said Tadikonda, who maintained the company’s expectations of another year of growth ahead as well as full funding with risk capital to support that growth.
“Corvus remains hyper-focused on tackling cyber risk with one of the largest specialized cyber underwriting teams in the industry, enabled by state-of-the-art technology and data-driven insights,” Tadikonda said. “This year, Corvus will continue to build the underwriting team and platform capabilities while also expanding our European and UK footprint. As the company sharpens focus on cyber risk and its unique underwriting capabilities, we have made strategic reductions to parts of our workforce – which is a net reduction of 14%.”
Tadikonda said Corvus had not reached the decision lightly. Everyone left at Corvus Insurance had been deeply appreciative of the hard work of their former colleagues. Vice president for cyber underwriting Peter Hedberg said in a Linkedin post:
“[It’s] come to my attention that there’s some unfortunate misinformation brewing around the industry [about Corvus]. Tuesday was a hard day for us at Corvus – we said goodbye to a lot of talented, bright flocks just because we made a structural decision in our business’ focus and delivery to service brokers.”
Hedberg proceeded to share that he – along with equally talented underwriting colleagues – continued to be employed at Corvus, where transparency and honesty remained tenets of its business model, and that they were free to approach for any questions about the company.
“Our structural decision to focus Corvus’s business on servicing brokers means that we are placing a heavy emphasis on continuing to grow our talented cyber underwriting team,” added Tadikonda. “Corvus has always [been], and will continue to be, focused on best serving our customers and growing the business to spread our mission of reducing the impact of cyber risk and incidents. We look forward to continuing to build our world-class business in the year ahead.”
