Shepherd, an AI-native commercial insurance platform focused on construction and infrastructure projects, announced it has raised $42 million in a Series B funding round led by Intact Private Capital, with participation from Spark Capital, Costanoa Ventures, and additional investors. The latest financing brings the company’s total funding to $67 million.
The company has experienced rapid growth, reporting more than 7x revenue expansion over the past 24 months. Shepherd has issued over 1,500 policies to more than 600 customers, covering over $400 billion in insured project value. Its clients include AI labs, chip manufacturers, hyperscalers, contractors, and energy developers building the physical infrastructure behind the AI economy.
Shepherd is addressing a key bottleneck in the AI infrastructure boom, the slow and outdated underwriting processes used by traditional insurers. While legacy carriers often take weeks to produce a quote, Shepherd’s AI-driven platform reduces underwriting timelines to hours by integrating real-time data from construction technology partners such as Procore, Autodesk, OpenSpace, DroneDeploy, and Samsara. This allows the platform to continuously assess jobsite conditions, safety metrics, and operational performance rather than relying on static applications.
A central component of the platform is Shepherd Savings, a behavior-based pricing model that uses real operational data from construction sites. Contractors that adopt modern construction technologies and demonstrate safer, more efficient practices receive improved pricing over time, creating a feedback loop between performance and insurance costs.
The company is also pursuing a longer-term vision of autonomous underwriting. Shepherd aims to transition from manual underwriting processes to AI-driven workflows where underwriters act as strategic overseers rather than processors. This shift is expected to significantly increase underwriting capacity, with the company targeting a 10x improvement in efficiency.
The Series B round was led by Intact Private Capital, the investment arm of Intact Financial Corporation, which is also partnering with Shepherd as a carrier to provide expanded underwriting capacity. Investors highlighted Shepherd’s use of real-time operational data and AI as a transformative approach in commercial insurance.
Shepherd currently offers commercial property and casualty insurance, including general liability and commercial auto, and has expanded into renewable energy and power projects as well as Builder’s Risk coverage. The platform operates as a managing general underwriter, partnering with large carriers while maintaining in-house underwriting authority.
The company is positioning itself at the intersection of AI infrastructure growth and insurance innovation, aiming to modernize how risk is assessed and priced for large-scale construction and energy projects.
KEY QUOTES:
“The AI race moved from the cloud to the construction site. Every GPU cluster needs a building. Every building needs to be constructed. Every data center requires dedicated power. And the insurance market that is supposed to keep those projects moving has been operating the same way for decades. We built Shepherd because we believed the old approach to commercial underwriting needed to change fundamentally, not just get faster, but get smarter. That is why the biggest names in AI infrastructure are choosing us. We believe the future of commercial insurance is behavior-based. The contractors who invest in technology to build safer and smarter should be rewarded for it, not priced the same as everyone else.”
Justin Levine, Co-Founder And CEO, Shepherd
“We mapped the same autonomy trajectory that transformed self-driving vehicles and applied it to underwriting. Today, an underwriter manually processes about 20 accounts a month and wastes significant time on submissions that are outside their appetite. In our model, an underwriter will oversee 200. AI handles intake, data enrichment, risk analysis, and pricing. The underwriter sets strategy, manages exceptions, and focuses on the accounts that matter most. We are closing in on the first fully agentic submission in commercial insurance. Email in, price out. No human intervention until the last mile. No other commercial carrier can make that claim. A year from now, commercial underwriting will be unrecognizable.”
Mo Mahallawy, Co-Founder And CTO, Shepherd
“At Intact Private Capital, we’ve seen every wave of insurtech. What Shepherd’s building is generational, it’s going to fully reshape the industry. Their AI-native approach to processing and segmenting commercial risk is unlike anything else we’ve seen in the industry. Justin, Mo, and the world-class team at Shepherd drove our conviction not just to lead this round but also to support Shepherd as a long-term capacity partner.”
Justin Smith-Lorenzetti, Managing Director, Intact Private Capital
“Shepherd has built an approach to commercial insurance that uses real operational data to assess risk in ways legacy carriers simply can’t. That platform has enabled the company to scale rapidly, expand into new industrial verticals like renewable energy, and grow sevenfold without compromising underwriting discipline. Shepherd is proving that better data leads to better outcomes for builders and brokers.”
Mark Selcow, General Partner, Costanoa Ventures
