If you own property in South Florida, you know firsthand just what an (expensive) pain property and casualty insurance can be.
“In the state of Florida in general – not just Miami – the situation around insurance and property and casualty is a bit alarming,” Neural Labs CEO Blair Austin Childs told Refresh Miami. “You see premiums going from x dollars to 2x, 3x dollars. That’s never a good sign.”
But in this alarming situation, Childs sees an opportunity. “When you see a market in which there are players who are reacting and shifting their focus and potentially pulling out of markets entirely, that’s a signal of a lack of clarity around predictive capabilities.”
So Childs tapped into his M&A/corporate finance background and did some good old fashioned research. “We dove into that pretty deeply with some of our strategic partners and understood why that existed and where the opportunity lies.”
The end result of that investigation is Neural Earth, Neural Labs’s artificial intelligence-powered platform that leverages data analytics to uncover unique insights. Insurance is the first product – the first tangible application of the platform’s possibilities – with a handful of additional areas still in the pipeline (and under wraps for now).
“We’re use case agnostic,” said Childs. “We’re building a platform to serve as many needs as possible.” Insurance made sense as a first step because of the major need, as well as an opportunity to pilot with a key industry partner. The ultimate goal: enable this company and others to better understand wherein the actual risk lies for each property, rather than having to increase rates across the board for all residents of a particular region.
To fuel the development of Neural Earth, it has closed an oversubscribed $1.4 million pre-seed funding round. While the exact investors are undisclosed, Childs signaled that participants included executives from the real estate and insurance industries.
Childs, who is originally from DC, moved to Florida two years ago, first landing in Tampa before settling in Miami. Alongside Childs is CTO Dan Lopez, a serial entrepreneur and investor who co-founded Radiant Earth and was in the c-suite of space platform Arkisys.
Next steps for Childs and team include commercializing the first product before quickly moving onto the second and third products. The company also has its sights set on a seed round to further accelerate growth and speed up adoption of our technology.
“We’re excited for what is to come in the next 12-18 months,” Childs asserted. “I think it’s going to be an acceleratory trajectory, and we’re ready to go.”
Already, Neural Earth has 15 full-time employees, around a third of whom are based in South Florida. Childs said that the company will be expanding its team very soon, especially in terms of engineering talent. “We’re open to people outside of Miami or Florida, but we’re definitely interested in creating opportunities in the state.”
