Insider Brief
- Shepherd raised $42 million in a Series B led by Intact Private Capital, bringing total funding to $67 million as it scales its AI-native commercial insurance platform.
- The company uses AI and real-time construction data to dramatically speed up underwriting, reducing turnaround times from weeks to hours while improving pricing accuracy.
- Serving major AI infrastructure projects, Shepherd is advancing toward fully autonomous underwriting, aiming to increase capacity and efficiency across commercial insurance workflows.
PRESS RELEASE — Shepherd, the AI-native commercial insurance platform, announced a $42 million Series B round led by Intact Private Capital, with participation from Spark Capital, Costanoa Ventures and additional investors. The raise brings Shepherd’s total funding to $67 million.
Shepherd has grown revenue more than 7x over the past 24 months, insuring over $400 billion in project value across more than 1,500 policies for 600+ customers — including the physical infrastructure behind the most recognized names in AI. The company’s clients include the leading AI labs, chip manufacturers, hyperscalers, general contractors, specialty builders, and energy developers constructing the facilities that form the physical foundation of the AI economy.
The AI boom has a physical layer, and it needs a new kind of insurance provider.
The race to build AI infrastructure is accelerating. Hyperscalers, chip manufacturers, and frontier AI labs are collectively deploying hundreds of billions of dollars into data center construction, power generation, and renewable energy projects. Every one of those projects has to be built and insured.
But the traditional carrier model was not designed for this speed. Complex commercial construction projects, the kind driving the AI buildout, routinely wait weeks for a single quote. Brokers chase carriers through calls, emails, and resubmissions. Legacy carriers are compiling their analysis through multiple disconnected and outdated systems, leading to longer wait times and inconsistent underwriting outcomes.
Shepherd was built to solve this. Their AI performs the same workflows in seconds, reducing underwriting feedback from weeks to hours. The platform also integrates real-time data from construction technology partners — Procore, Autodesk, OpenSpace, DroneDeploy, Samsara and others — directly into underwriting, pricing risk in a fraction of the time compared to traditional carriers. Where a typical carrier relies on a static application, Shepherd sees the project as it actually is being delivered: incident tracking, quality inspection rates, document management, and jobsite conditions updated continuously. With these partnerships, data, and AI platform, Shepherd can offer differentiated pricing for insureds through their unique Shepherd Savings program.
Shepherd insures the physical infrastructure for leading AI and technology companies building frontier data centers, semiconductor facilities, and energy assets. They chose Shepherd not because other carriers could not cover them — AI infrastructure is a competitive market — but because Shepherd delivers faster, more precise underwriting with less friction than anyone else in the market.
“The AI race moved from the cloud to the construction site,” said Justin Levine, CEO and Co-Founder of Shepherd. “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.”
Behavior-Based Pricing: Telematics for Commercial Insurance
Shepherd’s proprietary Shepherd Savings program represents a paradigm shift in how commercial risk is priced. Like telematics in auto insurance, where real driving behavior replaces demographic proxies, Shepherd Savings uses actual construction technology adoption and jobsite data to reward builders who invest in safety and operational excellence.
Contractors who use platforms from Shepherd partners like Procore, Autodesk, OpenSpace, or DroneDeploy receive differentiated pricing at enrollment, with pricing that improves further at renewal as a full year of usage data demonstrates a more precise risk profile. The program creates a direct feedback loop: invest in better construction practices, generate data that proves it, and receive pricing that reflects it.
“We believe the future of commercial insurance is behavior-based,” said Levine. “The contractors who invest in technology to build safer and smarter should be rewarded for it, not priced the same as everyone else.”
Building Toward Autonomous Underwriting
Shepherd is pursuing what the company describes as the most ambitious technical vision in commercial insurance: fully autonomous underwriting. The company has charted the path from manual underwriting to a future where AI handles the complete workflow and underwriters act as orchestrators rather than data-entry technicians.
“We mapped the same autonomy trajectory that transformed self-driving vehicles and applied it to underwriting,” said Mo Mahallawy, CTO and Co-Founder of Shepherd. “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.”
Shepherd is on a two-year path toward supervised autonomy where underwriters become portfolio orchestrators rather than processors, achieving a 10x increase in capacity.
“We are closing in on the first fully agentic submission in commercial insurance,” said Mahallawy. “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.”
Why Intact Led
The round was led by Intact Private Capital, the investment arm of Intact, one of the largest insurers in the world. Intact is not only Shepherd’s lead investor for this new financing but also a carrier partner, providing new expanded capacity alongside Shepherd’s existing carrier relationships.
“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.” said Justin Smith-Lorenzetti, Managing Director at Intact Private Capital. “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. “
Mark Selcow, General Partner at Costanoa added, “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.”
Platform and Product Expansion
Shepherd currently offers commercial property and casualty insurance — including general liability and commercial auto — for construction and infrastructure projects, with a growing renewable energy and power vertical. The company announced its expansion into renewable energy and power earlier this year, on the heels of its expansion into Builder’s Risk in April of 2025.
The platform operates as a managing general underwriter (MGU), partnering with large scale carriers to provide top-rated coverage while retaining underwriting authority in house. The Shepherd platform integrates directly with construction technology ecosystem partners like Procore, Autodesk, OpenSpace, DroneDeploy, and Samsara to ingest real-time project data that informs underwriting decisions.
By the numbers:
- $42M Series B led by Intact Private Capital
- $67M total funding raised
- 7x revenue growth in 24 months
- 600+ customers across commercial construction and infrastructure
- 1,500+ policies issued
- $400B+ in insured project value
About Shepherd
Shepherd is an AI-native insurance technology platform making risk frictionless for the builders and operators shaping the physical world. The company combines proprietary AI underwriting technology, real-time construction data integrations, and deep industry expertise to deliver commercial insurance with speed, precision, and intelligence. Shepherd insures construction, infrastructure, and energy projects for companies ranging from mid-market general contractors to the firms building frontier AI infrastructure. The company is headquartered in San Francisco with offices nationwide. For more information about Shepherd, visit www.shepherdinsurance.com.
About Intact Private Capital
Intact Private Capital provides long-term capital in dedicated partnership with generational founders. We are backed by Intact Financial Corporation, a global provider of property and casualty insurance with operations across North America, the UK and Europe. We exist to keep Intact at the forefront of our industry and to support founders through their entire journey via our venture and strategic growth capital strategies. For more information, please visit www.ipcap.com.
About Costanoa
Costanoa exists to elevate founders building companies of consequence. We lead investments from formation through Series A in Applied AI, AI Infrastructure, Cybersecurity, National Security, and Fintech. With $2.5B AUM, we’re boutique by design — making fewer investments to deliver deeper expertise and operational support when it matters most: the early, defining stages of growth. We have been recognized as one of America’s Top Venture Capital Firms by TIME and named to a top 4 Seed-Stage firm on Inc.’s Founder-Friendly Investors list. For more information, please visit www.costanoa.vc.
Media contact: [email protected]
Featured image: Credit: Shepherd
