The Story of Kalepa: Building the Future of Insurance Underwriting

Sometimes the most transformative insights come from unexpected places. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Paul Monasterio shares how his journey from nuclear physics to insurance technology led to founding Kalepa, a company reshaping how insurers evaluate and price risk.

From Physics Labs to Financial Services

Paul’s story begins far from the insurance industry. “I’m originally from Venezuela, came to the States for college, and I started my career as a scientist. I was a nucleophysicist, of all things, back in the day,” he explains. This scientific background would later prove invaluable in understanding and transforming insurance underwriting.

His path to insurance began at Applied Predictive Technologies (APT), which he describes as “an older breed of what now invoke AI companies… basically the earlier wave of big data analytics, predictive analytics, but really applying the scientific method experimentation to cases where it couldn’t have been done before.”

Finding the Insurance Connection

Working with major insurance carriers at APT, Paul began to see parallels between scientific analysis and insurance underwriting. “I’m a scientist by training and insurance is the one industry that was taking data seriously hundreds of years prior to calculators,” he notes. “Those folks were collecting information about losses and about frequency of different types of outcomes by hand on pieces of paper hundreds of years ago.”

This realization led to the founding of Kalepa, with a mission to help insurance underwriters make better decisions. The company’s platform, Copilot, helps underwriters understand which opportunities are most suitable and assess business risks more effectively.

Building in a Traditional Industry

Rather than positioning themselves as disruptors, Kalepa took a more nuanced approach. “We do combine that view of outsiders and tech focus and really understanding what you can do versus what it’s being done now, but with a lot of humility for the hard work that the underwriters and insurance companies are doing day to day,” Paul explains.

This strategy has paid off. In an industry flooded with AI hype, Kalepa focuses on delivering immediate, tangible value. “When we do a demo for a client, we ask them, just send us a submission. Send us a risk that just came to your desk. Let’s just do it on that,” Paul shares. This approach creates instant validation: “There’s a wow moment when they can basically see, okay, this is not smoke and mirrors.”

The Vision Ahead

Looking to the future, Paul sees insurance as more than just a business opportunity. “When insurance works well, it is an engine of innovation,” he explains. “If people don’t feel comfortable with taking risk because they don’t know who’s going to take care of them when things go sideways, they just don’t.”

With commercial insurance representing a trillion-dollar global market, Kalepa’s ambitions are substantial. While their platform currently handles billions in premium volume, Paul notes they’re still just “1/1000 of the way where we want to go” in their mission to ensure every insurance transaction is underwritten perfectly.

The company has doubled its customer base in the last six months, driven by market conditions and product evolution. As Paul observes, “We’re seeing a lot of hardening in the market. We’re seeing that it’s more difficult to write insurance that increases demand for solutions like Copilot.”

For Kalepa, the future lies in continuing to bridge the gap between cutting-edge technology and traditional insurance expertise, helping underwriters make better decisions while respecting the fundamental principles that have sustained the industry for centuries.