Descartes Underwriting
Parametric re/insurance for climate and emerging risks
About
Descartes Underwriting is a corporate parametric re/insurance specialist covering natural catastrophes and emerging risks — floods, earthquakes, cyclones, hurricanes, hail, wildfires. Its in-house climate-risk modelling team builds proprietary algorithms combining physics and AI over IoT, satellite, radar and third-party data, and policies pay out on predefined triggers instead of lengthy loss adjustment.
Strengths: one of the industry's largest climate modelling teams; operates in 60+ countries with up to $200M capacity per contract (third-party directory figure); renewed its Generali parametric partnership in September 2026; adopted the mea platform's AI for underwriting automation. Honest limits: broker and corporate channel only; the ~30% growth and $500M premium targets are company-reported.
What it can do
- Parametric climate cover
- AI and physics-based risk models
- Multi-peril nat-cat products
- Automatic trigger payouts
- Satellite and IoT data ingestion
Setup
- Work through a broker to approach Descartes.
- Define perils, triggers and coverage needs.
- Descartes models the risk with its climate data stack.
- Agree on parametric triggers and capacity.
- Policies pay automatically when triggers are met.
Prerequisites
Corporate or public-sector client via a broker; defined parametric triggers.
Use cases
Works with
Trust score — 7/10
Scored 7/10 (verified tier, metrics-v1). Evidence: Parametric re/insurance for climate risks in 60+ countries; physics-plus-AI modelling team.; Generali partnership renewed September 2026; adopted mea AI platform. Growth figures are company-reported.. License: Proprietary insurance products written on A-rated securities..
How the trust score is built
Full methodology →- Adoption · stars/downloads, log-scaled vs peers
- 7.0/10
- Maintenance · recency, releases, issue load
- 8.0/10
- Openness · license + docs
- 4.0/10
- Manual review · sanity read + red-flag check
- 7.0/10
- · Parametric re/insurance for climate risks in 60+ countries; physics-plus-AI modelling team.
- · Generali partnership renewed September 2026; adopted mea AI platform. Growth figures are company-reported.
Sources
Every fact above was checked against these sources. Where a claim comes from the provider and couldn't be independently verified, the text says so.