Scouting for Growth

Agentic Frontier: Re-imagining Enterprise AI with EY x Microsoft

On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to Ulrich (Uli) Homann, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft, and Mark Luquire, EY Global Microsoft Alliance Co-innovation Leader, about how to build an agentic AI enterprise that doesn’t just work faster, but works smarter and, most importantly, works for everyone.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
In the past automation has been very task driven and specific, things had to go in a certain order and you needed to know that order ahead of time. While you need some of that with generative AI, we now have a system that can help do some of that thinking, so if things change in the process along the way, you can deal with it. Now you can rethink what processes even need to exist and focus on the outcome and how to get to it in a new way. 
By giving everyone at EY access to generative AI a couple of years ago we learned that people were able to accomplish more more quickly. They used it as a thought-partner, used it as a way to fine tune the product they were working on. Being able to see the evolution of generative AI to now where it’s coding applications on its own almost, seeing the new agent capabilities and tools, and being able to take action on its own with very little prompting, it opens the doors to possibilities and what you’ll be able to do in the future. 
BEST MOMENTS 
‘Focus on where you want to be and then rethink how you’re going to get there, that’s the real key.’
‘It’s not just an assistant to you, providing you with information, it’s actually taking on work it’s actually thinking through and processing those things as well.’
ABOUT THE GUESTS
Ulrich (Uli) Homann is a Corporate Vice President & Distinguished Architect in the Cloud + AI business at Microsoft. As part of the senior engineering leadership team, he’s responsible for the customer-led innovation efforts across the cloud and enterprise platform portfolio. Previously Homann was the Chief Architect for Microsoft worldwide enterprise services, having formerly played a key role in the business’ newly formed Platforms, Technology and Strategy Group. Prior to joining Microsoft in 1991, he worked for several small consulting companies, where he designed and developed distributed systems and has spent most of his career using well-defined applications and architectures to simplify and streamline the development of business applications.
Mark Luquire leads the EY organization’s global efforts to co-develop innovative solutions with Microsoft and clients, driving growth and accelerating technology strategy. He oversees cross-functional teams spanning sectors and service lines, serving as a key liaison to Microsoft’s product and engineering teams.
Previously, Mark headed Platform Adoption for EY Global, leading enterprise-wide AI and cloud enablement, including integrating generative AI tools like EYQ, GitHub Copilot and Microsoft Copilot. He also created the first EY Global DevOps Practice and led cloud transformation efforts, making EY a leader in Microsoft Azure usage. Mark’s career includes leadership roles in large healthcare enterprises and technology startups, where he established scalable operations, spearheaded digital transformation, and built high-performing global teams.
ABOUT THE HOST
Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and trust. On Scouting for Growth, she decodes how real growth happens—where capital, collaboration, and courage meet.
If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights.
And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at hello@alchemycrew.ventures

Laurna Castillo: How Wildfire Resilience is Rebuilding California

On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to Laurna Castillo, Senior Vice President of Product at CSAA Insurance Group, a AAA insurer serving millions of customers across the western United States.
Laurna has become a leading voice in reimagining how the insurance industry – and entire communities – can build resilience in the face of escalating wildfire risk. On this episode, Laurna will share her journey, lessons learned from the frontlines of growth, and actionable insights for listeners eager to drive meaningful impact in their own ventures.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
The AAA was originally an automobile association focused on making cars safer, advocating for seatbelts, for example. Without seatbelts, car insurance would be more expensive, making driving less accessible to the average person. It’s the same with wildfire; there are massive quantities of homes being lost every year, and if we don’t have these solutions for fewer homes being burned down by wildfire, it’s going to be less accessible for the average consumer to live in places like California.
Knowing where to start was our biggest challenge, but picking a direction and sticking with it, and recognising all the different facets that need progressing, we leant in when we recognised those.
We’ve learned that people are overwhelmed. There’s so much information out there, if you speak to your neighbour, you might get one thing, if you speak to your local fire chief, you might get another. That was reinforced in our community engagements, as was the fact that trusted voices matter; people are most likely to trust the motivations of people they know rather than insurance companies.
We’ve been leaning into this problem with this mindset for over a decade, and it’s becoming a strategic focus and imperative for us because of the increase in large-scale fires affecting many properties. One of the most important issues is where to start with mitigation. The 0-5-foot ignition zone is the single most important factor. The next is scalability, we need to rally around and give common standards and similar messages, that will help homeowners receive clear, consistent guidance.
BEST MOMENTS 
‘Do the next, best, right thing that’s in front of you. If you keep doing that, eventually it builds up into a system of change and collective progress.’ 
‘I cannot emphasise enough how important partnerships are to this problem. They extend reach.’
‘The easiest way to have a wildfire resilient home is to build one, building one that’s not resilient and trying to retrofit it is less optimal and not as easy.’
‘The single most important thing is clearing flammable material (fences, overhanging trees and bushes) from a 0-5 foot zone from the house.’
ABOUT THE GUESTS
Laurna Castillo is a forward-thinking leader and passionate advocate for innovation and sustainable growth. With a dynamic background spanning entrepreneurship, community development, and strategic leadership, Laurna has dedicated her career to empowering organizations and individuals to unlock their full potential.
LinkedIn
ABOUT THE HOST
Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and trust. On Scouting for Growth, she decodes how real growth happens—where capital, collaboration, and courage meet.
If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights.
And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at hello@alchemycrew.ventures

Yo Kwon: How AI Claim Letters Cut Errors, Costs, and Cycle Times

On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to Yo Kwon, CEO at Voltaire.Claims.
Together, we pull back the curtain on how enterprise operations (and in particular finance and insurance operations) are being reinvented – not tomorrow, but right now.
KEY TAKEAWAYS          
I was working with my co-founder on Ai technology trying to work out what would be applicable for wider businesses. While we were testing ideas someone was using one of our products to write claims letters.
Adjustors don’t enjoy writing claims letter, especially denials, they lean heavily on templates and cheat sheets to figure out the clauses to cite, so small mistakes and big ones can slip though. Voltaire generates each letter from scratch, it doesn’t take shortcuts which removes the room for error. 
Litigation alone adds an average of $10,718 per claim in loss adjustment expense, we projects Voltaire can reduce litigated claims by 10% or more through more defensible correspondence. Even a conservative 5% improvement in leakage through clearer letters translates to $320,00 in recovered value. 
We include critical guardrails. If an adjustor requests a denial letter but there’s no valid policy exclusion that exists to support the denial, the system returns ‘no relevant policy language was found’. This prevents a wrongful denial or compliance violation before it happens.
BEST MOMENTS 
‘Before I started this company I did not think this would be a problem in 2025, and this is a problem because of the complexities of claims.’ 
‘Whenever productivity is measured, people will choose speed over compliance, I’d go far as to say most adjustors never actually learn the correct way to write a claims letter.’‘Claims managers and adjustors have told us the AI is teaching them things about policies that they’ve never known before.’‘Our approach treats compliance as a product feature, not an afterthought.’
ABOUT THE GUESTS
Yo Kwon is the Co-Founder and CEO of Voltaire.Claims, where he leads the development of cutting-edge AI solutions that transform insurance correspondence. With deep expertise in artificial intelligence, decentralized systems, and cybersecurity, Yo brings a rigorous technical perspective to one of the industry’s most overlooked but high-impact challenges: claims letter automation. Under his leadership, Voltaire has built a lightweight, API-driven platform that integrates seamlessly with core systems like Guidewire to deliver accurate, regulator-compliant claim letters in seconds. LinkedIn
ABOUT THE HOST
Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and trust. On Scouting for Growth, she decodes how real growth happens—where capital, collaboration, and courage meet.
If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights.
And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at hello@alchemycrew.ventures

Bobbie Shrivastav: Building the Insurance Ops OS - Generative AI Workflows That Cut 70% of Manual Work

On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to Bobbie Shrivastav, co-founder and CEO of Solvrays about building AI-driven workflows that aim to eliminate 70% of manual back office work with governance, auditability, and with human-in-the-loop controls directly built in. They also talk about what makes vertical AI for insurance defensible and measurable, compressing sales and implementation cycles without cutting corners on risk, change management, and how to augment teams as talent retires while new talent ramps up.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
When the work comes into an organisation, not everything is digital. Things are still mailed, the first help we provide is extracting the information from those manual sources and place it with the right person in their case management system. That alone eliminates 5-7 touch points.
When an agent sends an email we’re able to get a new business application, we’re able to extract the information, we understand that this is a new business applications, and we can take that data and integrate it into the new business solution. Before, someone would have checked an email, gone to the new business application and keyed that in so work could move in. We’ve eliminated that complex new business touch point.
74% of our industry is still tackling legacy. Customers don’t care if you’re still using mainframes, they shouldn’t feel a difference. We’re using agentic AI as a connector to legacy systems, we’re also doing database to database connectors, and for newer systems we’re using APIs.
We eliminate a dependency factor and empowered IT to work with new technologies, so they’re not dependent on us. But the business and IT partnership with any project, whether it’s our solution or another, is the key to success.
BEST MOMENTS
‘We want to be a ray of hope for the operations staff for back office.’
‘What makes us superior, from an industry point of view, is that we’ve innovated in this space for the last 10 years, we understand operations intimately.’
‘Once a signature is signed, our goal is to do one workflow in two weeks, not months or years, weeks.’
‘Where I’ve seen most anxiety in business and IT is in implementation, it can drain your team. Our goal is: If we can build our orchestration layer the right way you don’t have to be so tense.’
ABOUT THE GUESTS
Bobbie Shrivastav is founder and managing principal of Solvrays. Previously, she was co-founder and CEO of Docsmore, where she introduced an interactive, workflow-driven document management solution to optimize operations. She then co-founded Benekiva, where, as COO, she spearheaded initiatives to improve efficiency and customer engagement in life insurance.
She co-hosts the Insurance Sync podcast with Laurel Jordan, where they explore industry trends and innovations. She is a co-author of the book series "Momentum: Makers and Builders" with Renu Ann Joseph.
LinkedIn
ABOUT THE HOST
Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and trust. On Scouting for Growth, she decodes how real growth happens—where capital, collaboration, and courage meet.
If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights.
And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at hello@alchemycrew.ventures

Amrit Santhirasenan: Talks Agentic Underwriting… From Theory to Enterprise Transformation

On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to Amit Santhirasenan, co-founder and CEO of hyperexponential, an actuary and software engineer who has built the AI native pricing and underwriting platform used by leading specialty carriers.
In this episode we cover how to turn messy submissions into structured signals your pricing model can trust – without hiring an army, multi agent architectures, the agentic AI mesh, and the human in the loop controls executives need for auditability and speed, and where agentic underwriting is ready today (and where it isn’t), plus the metrics executives should track—cycle time, hit ratio, and loss ratio uplift.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Email submissions were a luxury at the start of my career! What’s been so exciting for me, as a self-professed nerd, is the pace at which the capabilities of core models have got so good that even 6 months ago was a whole product’s capability and feature set is now within the gift of Gemini or GPT5.
If you’re an underwriter filling out a spreadsheet/renew model, in 2025 you need to be working with hx underwriting , actuary or agent inside a renew model to have your paired partner helping you get to the best result.
Why can’t you have deep risk research on every single risk? Why can’t you say: Tell me the most important characteristics in the world that you can tell me about the top 3 exposures? No human can do this work, the cost/benefit trade off there isn’t economic, but you can run an OpenAI deep risk API call to do that on every single risk you underwrite today. We do it for you, it’s what we do. All of a sudden it’s dramatically easier to bring that level of differentiation and specialism in the way that great underwriting has always been done to every single risk you want to touch.
BEST MOMENTS
‘You won’t see that many places with a $7 trillion contribution to GDP, with such a small number of companies and people responsible for this.’
‘We demonstrated the first API machine vision algorithm in the market in 2017, now kids coming out of university are doing that as toy projects before they get to our clients.’
‘You can have an army of digital agents helping you now, all for $20 per month!’
‘Generative AI models have unlocked the ability to pull data so quickly out of the information required for underwrite that you can put a very quick red/amber/green status on risks, several orders of magnitude greater than ever before.’
ABOUT THE GUESTS
Amrit Santhirasenan is the Co-founder and CEO of Hyperexponential (hx), the AI native pricing and underwriting platform for P&C insurers. Under his leadership, Hx Renew has become known for delivering executive-level outcomes: ~50% faster submission-to-bind, 10× faster model build and deployment, and a platform that supports $45bn+ in GWP for 20+ enterprise customers worldwide.
A qualified actuary and computer scientist, Amrit previously spent over a decade in the London Market. He served as Head of Pricing & Analytics at Tokio Marine Kiln, building the managing agent’s first technical pricing team to support ~£1.5bn GWP, and earlier held actuarial roles at Catlin (including standing up the Canadian actuarial function).
ABOUT THE HOST
Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and trust. On Scouting for Growth, she decodes how real growth happens—where capital, collaboration, and courage meet.
If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights.
And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at hello@alchemycrew.ventures

Will Ross: The Federato Playbook — RiskOps, Appetite, and Winnability for Profitable Growth

On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to Will Ross, Co-Founder & CEO of Federato, and if you’re an underwriting transformation leader—drowning in Excel, stale pilots, and disconnected data sources—this episode is for you.
Will Ross isn’t here to sell you hype. He’s here to show what it looks like when AI actually delivers: faster quotes, better decisions, happier underwriters, and measurable results before the next board meeting.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Thinking back to when Amazon released the Echo with Alexa and a bunch of us bought them and took them apart to figure out how it worked reminds me of how Wild West the early days of AI was a decade and a half ago. Now any undergraduate student taking computer science will have some exposure to AI. One of the first things they might learn is how to do simple tasks like that on very little computational resource. I love jumping into our products like that to understand how they work.
Break down what AI means: There’s an idea of intelligence or grasping a concept or knowledge, then there’s artificial – doing something in place of a human. You can take it a step further and look at ‘generative’ – generating a thing, or predictive – predicting a thing, agentic – giving it agency and allowing it to complete a task. 
What is it that humans do today and, theoretically, what could humans do if they had unlimited time to do their jobs? For underwriters, the process is similar across many line of business: you analyse an exposure, loss history and loss control to come up with a rate perspective, etc. Where can AI systems interact with that process?
BEST MOMENTS
‘One of the things I think is really scary with AI today is its perpetuation of news cycles and how fast it spreads.’ 
‘No matter how sceptical people are, the vast majority of people are already using these technologies to do their jobs. By bringing them into the room, making them aware of what this technology does, and letting the interact with it, that’s a powerful thing.’
‘There are going to be jobs that change, but we shouldn’t think about it as AI replacing our jobs, we should think about it as someone using AI to do our job who will replace us.’
‘What we call AI today will change and change again because it always has; Deep Blue used to be called AI and is now called a chess simulator.’
ABOUT THE GUESTS
William Ross is a product and operations leader obsessed with solving the toughest problems in insurance with a mix of pragmatism, speed, and machine learning. As a core member of the Federato leadership team, Will focuses on one mission: turning underwriting from a slow, manual grind into a dynamic, data-driven advantage.
At Federato, Will is helping specialty and commercial carriers build resilience and growth into their underwriting operations, showing chief underwriting and transformation officers that AI doesn’t need to be another failed pilot—it can be the competitive edge that secures market share today.
LinkedIn
ABOUT THE HOST
Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and trust. On Scouting for Growth, she decodes how real growth happens—where capital, collaboration, and courage meet.
If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights.
And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at hello@alchemycrew.ventures

Sara Mikulski: One Source of Truth, Zero Excuses

On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to Sara Mikulski, CTO at Kingstone Insurance, about the moment in her career that convinced her that the claims ecosystem could be rebuilt around a single, trusted data spine.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
When I started my career, success looked like stabilisation: getting to a point where we all understood what was happening in which system, where the data was, and just making it work. It wasn’t a long-term scalable solution, but I didn’t want to come into the organisation and disrupt it. It wasn’t ready yet, the first 18 months were about learning what was working and what wasn’t before making a move to address the concerns and questions in a scalable way.
Between then and now, we’ve changed the entire platform and focused on ensuring that there were clear processes, good data in the right places, so we could automate more and enable future AI. This has made our adjustors so happy, as well as us, from an IT perspective, where it’s easier to maintain, help, and administer, etc.
Many large AI initiatives that impact your core systems don’t always go as expected. The biggest learning we’ve had, as an organisation, over the last year was to not run before you can walk. Sometimes you think AI can fix the problem or the process, but when you start to talk it through or dissect it, you find out you could simply tweak the system to be better for the people using it or explore a different way of doing the process.
BEST MOMENTS
‘There were less emotional decisions in the first place because we took our time and really thought things through.’
‘You have to focus on how to make that one place your place – making sure the data that in there is clean, true, what data is there, what data your adjustors need to go outside of the system for and why.’
‘Efficiency is king right now, which is why AI is getting such a movement behind it; you’re trying to find places where you don’t have to do something manually, or something that takes hours and condensing it to seconds.’
‘AI will play an enormous role in current and future processes at all insurance carriers, but you still have to go back to the basics and figure out if you’re just trying to put a band aid on the problem or if you’re trying to solve it long-term.’
ABOUT THE GUESTS
Sara Mikulski is Chief Technology Officer at Kingstone Insurance and is responsible for managing our IT organization and accountable for the company’s systems and data strategy, IT security, infrastructure, development, support, and vendor management.
Sara brings 15+ years of experience in IT, leading effective teams and improving IT operations. Most recently, she was the Deputy CIO at UPC Insurance, where she was responsible for delivering numerous projects aimed at consolidating platforms and reducing technical debt. She also held leadership and technical IT positions at Esurance. Ms. Mikulski also worked at several other companies in various IT-focused roles.
LinkedIn
ABOUT THE HOST
Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and trust. On Scouting for Growth, she decodes how real growth happens—where capital, collaboration, and courage meet.
If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights.
And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at hello@alchemycrew.ventures

Arvind Sontha: Kyber’s AI Automation Transform Insurance Claims

On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to Arvind Sontha, COE and co-founder of Kyber, an AI startup redefining how carriers handle claims correspondence.
The insurance industry is undergoing a seismic shift as carriers face mounting pressure to deliver faster, more transparent, and compliant communications to policyholders and clients, making the need for digital claims transformation greater than ever.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
If you think about insurance and tailoring, the underlying model of risk is effectively a ‘user personal model’. We started with an obscure line of insurance that didn’t exist yet, or did around personal cyber insurance. We wondered what it would look like, rather than SMB or commercial cyber insurance, as individual underwriting and risk modelling.
We got lucky in finding a great partner in branch insurance very early on. Over the course of our time engaging with them, we ended up turning into an extension of their team. We were able to work closely with them; they trusted us to quickly understand their problems and iterate to deliver quick solutions, while at the same time, they understood that there would be quirks with products that weren’t fully fleshed out, which they could iron out over time. It was a symbiotic relationship.
If an adjustor has to take an hour to put a document together, you have to clear a 1.5-hour space in your calendar to do that. Life is hectic, you have meetings and other tasks to do, and so that 1.5-hour block keeps getting moved back, same thing happens to managers. If you can take it from 1.5 hours to 30 seconds for a high-quality letter and a one-click approval, you can slip that into any part of your calendar. That’s a really underrated part of the process.
Some of the things we want to do in the future include things like managed parameters. We think it’s obtuse for all the carriers to handle fraud language individually all the time, for example. Kyber could manage that for you to make sure everything’s automatically compliant and good to go. Statutory language really enables the full organisation to be prepared to catch each other.
BEST MOMENTS
‘Kyber is an AI native, document generation and delivery platform made for claims teams, that’s what we do.’
‘Nobody doubted that I could build the complex AI to underwrite and quantify the risk; what they needed to figure out was whether I could sell insurance, which is why I got my broker’s licence!’
‘The results have been better than I expected, we’ve seen 65% faster drafting times, 80% consolidation of their templates across a 50-state operation, and 5x reduction in letter cycle times for documents.’
ABOUT THE GUESTS
Arvind Sontha is co-founder and CEO of Kyber, an AI startup that is redefining how carriers’ NTPAs handle claims correspondence. Arvind is at the forefront of digital transformation, leading Kyber’s mission to automate and streamline the entire lifecycle of claims forms and letters.
Kyber’s clients report that the impact of AI automation is undeniable: Claims teams using Kyber have reduced letter drafting time by up to 85%, cut review time by 60%, and achieved a 3x faster outreach to policyholders.
LinkedIn
ABOUT THE HOST
Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and trust. On Scouting for Growth, she decodes how real growth happens—where capital, collaboration, and courage meet.
If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights.
And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at hello@alchemycrew.ventures

Charlie Wendland: How AI and Human Empathy Are Transforming the Future of Claims

On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to Charlie Wendland, chief claims officer at Branch Insurance.
The world of claims management is undergoing a seismic shift, with AI at its heart. Insurers leveraging AI have reported a 75% reduction in claims handling time and 50% increase in fraud detection accuracy. Cutting claims processing times allows adjustors to focus on complex decisions and customer care.
Charlie talks about technology only being part of the story. The future of claims is about continuous transformation, balancing innovation with compliance, and making sure that as we innovate, we don’t lose sight of empathy and trust.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
The combination of investigation, problem solving, and most importantly, being there for people in their worst moments – as a claims adjustor – felt both intellectually engaging and genuinely meaningful. It really drew me to the role.
We’re small and can’t afford to build a fully fleshed-out claims organisation. So, we made strategic investments to automate administrative tasks that typically weigh down our adjustors, affect road loss outcomes, and drive expense inefficiencies. We listened to our adjustors; we conducted many time studies to identify what’s bogging them down; we proactively sought out inefficient processes and looked for technology to improve them.
We’ve taken an iterative approach to everything that we’ve built, understanding that it’s not going to be perfect when we first launch, but we’re going to be really sensitive to what is not perfect and seek perfection even though we know that’s not possible.
BEST MOMENTS
‘Find administrative tasks that weigh down your adjustors, free them of those through technology, and they can spend more time on complex issues and customer care.’
‘We get adjustor’s opinions on everything that we do, for the most part, which sounds inefficient, but it’s really not because we do it in a very thoughtful way.’
‘70% of our first notice-of-lossis  now either done electronically or through a voice AI.’
‘With a startup, change is ever-present because we’re trying to find a way to do something and we’re able to change quite quickly, but the hurdles are all self-inflicted, so if we’re not communicating effectively, that’s on us.’
ABOUT THE GUESTS
Charlie Wendland has 20+ years of expertise transforming claims operations across commercial and personal lines. As Chief Claims Officer at Branch, he leads an organisation that's reimagining the insurance experience through technology and customer-centric innovation while delivering optimal claim outcomes.
Charlie’s leadership philosophy centres on driving operational efficiency that benefits both customers and the business, building collaborative teams that deliver exceptional results, and pioneering approaches that redefine industry standards.
Throughout his career, Charlie has consistently delivered growth while enhancing customer satisfaction. I'm passionate about modernizing insurance and mentoring the next generation of industry leaders.
LinkedIn
ABOUT THE HOST
Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and trust. On Scouting for Growth, she decodes how real growth happens—where capital, collaboration, and courage meet.
If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights.
And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at hello@alchemycrew.ventures

Barbara Schonhofer & Carmen Powell: Empowerment, Leadership, Inclusion & Future Growth

On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to Barbara Schonhofer and Carmen Powell, two influential voices who have navigated and thrived in the ever-evolving insurance industry.
In today’s conversation, we explore the sector’s evolution, the future of work, and best practices for continuous networking and development.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
When I started my career in 1972, men didn’t know how to behave as women came into their own in business and took frontline roles. It wasn’t so much misogyny that I faced; it was more like old geezers having a laugh; they didn’t know how to welcome women into their workplace because it was less usual. I found my way by being more humorous and smarter in my responses, so I sidestepped a lot of the banter in my early career. There were only a few predatory men; most just didn’t know how to behave in front of women.
I have always celebrated being different. Anything that was an idiosyncrasy was put down to the fact that I was Spanish, and that suited me fine! That served me well because I didn’t have to follow the norms. However, when I interviewed for a very large organisation in the UK, the HR director asked me how I would cope with men making a pass at me. I said that I was coming here to work and that if anybody crossed the line, I knew how to deal with that.
BEST MOMENTS
‘The men that were kindest to me didn’t help me, and the ones that gave me a tough time did business with me. I learned to keep my friends close and my enemies closer.’
‘The most wonderful boss I had was a woman, the rest have been men, but, like Barbara, they gave me a hard time and pushed my boundaries enough, so I knew I was resilient enough.’
‘With everything, you take two steps forward and one step back.’
ABOUT THE GUESTS
Barbara Schonhofer’s career in financial services covers four decades, operating as a business leader and later as an executive search consultant to the insurance markets. When she began her career, she set out to better understand the complexities of much-needed culture change in insurance. During her years in financial services as an executive search consultant, Barbara challenged conventional practices and identified the need to bring together women leaders in the London Market to network.
Alongside ISC-Group, Barbara co-founded and co-Chaired GAIN, a non-profit membership organisation that encourages a better understanding and inclusion of neurodiverse individuals in the insurance industry. She is a Freeman of the City of London and a member of the Worshipful Company of Insurers, where she co-founded its female network, iWIN. LinkedIn
Carmen Powell is an experienced international marketing and business development professional whose strategic expertise is underpinned by a practical, positive approach to achieving challenging goals, including establishing new markets and reversing declining revenues whilst successfully navigating large, complex organisational matrices.
Carmen has a passion for building societal prosperity and strengthening the ethical behaviour of organisations through making a difference to their bottom line. Ethics matter. Carmen constantly strives to deliver value in ever-changing corporate environments while also making a positive difference in our world. LinkedIn
ABOUT THE HOST
Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and trust. On Scouting for Growth, she decodes how real growth happens—where capital, collaboration, and courage meet.
If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights.
And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at hello@alchemycrew.ventures

Yandy Plasencia: Data Reconciliation for the CFO

On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to Yandy Plasencia, founder and CEO of DataHaven Software.
In today’s conversation, we talk about Yandy’s journey and vision as well as how mid-sized insurance companies can explore and empower their finance teams, especially their CFOs, by automating data reconciliation and unlocking real-time insights.
KEY TAKEAWAYS         
For the most part, it all comes down to the basic ledger/sub-ledger challenge. The core systems are transactional and contain all the information about what took place, which payments were paid out, when a claim came in, and everything needed to verify that a claim has coverage within the rules defined by the policy. If the data isn’t easy to extract and digestible for the right audience, it will be challenging for that audience to interpret, reconcile, and do so in a timely fashion.
In smaller carriers, there will be more technical folks who are not necessarily business-oriented. There’s always a gap between what the business and technology folks are looking for, and although technology does a very good job of getting the data where it needs to go, it doesn’t always meet the needs of the finance and accounting folks. There an ongoing friction between both departments.
You need to build an intelligence layer with well-defined relationships across every data point related to financials. If it affects financials, you need to have a relationship, ontology, or something that tells you how these data points are interrelated. If you don’t have that, then it’s only creating a problem for something else that’s going to come up very soon.
The main issue with spreadsheets with visualisation tools is that those tools solve the problem short-term until they don’t, they are extremely helpful until they become painful, and they become a bottleneck for the organisation to grow eventually. The tools don’t have change processes in place as data sets grow and organisations expand. They also become a personnel risk because only 1 or 2 people in the company understand it.
BEST MOMENTS
‘Data is a powerful tool, and it’s “make it or break it” for a lot of companies, especially in insurance, where the devil is in the details.’‘Being able to trace an expense back to the root system and getting a full transactional detail for that specific number is the most reliable way to do something.’‘It’s only labour-intensive if you try to do this completely manually and you don’t leverage artificial intelligence in the right ways, and if you don’t have a defined framework to do this, if you do, it’s much easier.’‘It’s not rocket science… It’s just data science.’
ABOUT THE GUESTS
Yandy Plasencia is a visionary entrepreneur and software architect with deep expertise in AI, data engineering, insurance technology, and regulatory compliance.
At DataHaven, Yandy and his team are creating an insurance-specific intelligence layer that automates reconciliation, accelerates financial analysis, and helps leadership trace changes in loss or expense ratios directly to operational events.
LinkedIn
ABOUT THE HOST
Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and trust. On Scouting for Growth, she decodes how real growth happens—where capital, collaboration, and courage meet.
If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights.
And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at hello@alchemycrew.ventures

Mike Gulla: Power Outage Coverage Reinvented Amid 78% Surge

On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to Mike Gulla, CEO of Adaptive Insurance, whose team is redefining what it means to be resilient in an era of climate uncertainty and operational volatility.
We’ll explore why now is the time for parametric and adaptive insurance, what inspired the creation of Adaptive, and how emerging technologies like AI, big data, and cloud computing are transforming the insurance landscape.
KEY TAKEAWAYS         
Mike founded Adaptive in early 2024 to help businesses build financial resilience against climate change by leveraging parametric products and unique data assets.
Starting a business comes with many challenges – revenue planning, product selection, and insurance. Our focus is on helping owners understand how environmental factors, such as extreme weather or business interruptions, could impact them over time.
Power outages show that even with backup systems, grid failures can cause major disruptions – from dark streets to reduced customer traffic.
As climate shifts, populations are moving into areas with new weather risks. My focus is on creating innovative insurance products that turn these challenges into opportunities for good
BEST MOMENTS
‘The consumer needs knowledge to understand what the things are that are ultimately going to impact their business.’
‘Speed is huge, which is why we use parametric products, a business owner needs to be able to make a decision very quickly after an event occurs. When you combine knowledge with speed, it helps them make a better decision for their business.’
The insurance industry has suffered from how fast things have changed.’
‘Parametric insurance products are similar to streaming services in that they allow the consumer a new opportunity to have access to a different type of coverage that specifically focuses on something that might impact their business.’
ABOUT THE GUESTS
Mike Gulla, CEO and Co-Founder of Adaptive Insurance, has over 20 years of experience in the insurance industry and is passionate about transforming how insurance works by leveraging technology and innovative strategies. His career is marked by a commitment to making insurance more adaptive, efficient, and customer-focused.
Mike’s leadership at Adaptive Insurance reflects his vision for a smarter, more responsive industry—one that meets the evolving needs of clients in a rapidly changing world. Known for his forward-thinking approach and dedication to excellence, Mike continues to inspire teams and drive meaningful change across the insurance landscape.
LinkedIn
ABOUT THE HOST
Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and trust. On Scouting for Growth, she decodes how real growth happens—where capital, collaboration, and courage meet.
If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights.
And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at hello@alchemycrew.ventures