Behind Our Series B: AI's Physical Layer, and Why We Just Raised $42M to Insure It
Everyone talks about the AI boom in terms of compute, models, and software. I spend my days thinking about something different: who insures the actual construction of the data centers, energy assets, and projects that make all of it possible.
The AI race moved from the cloud to the construction site. And the construction site has an insurance problem.
Today I'm excited to share that Shepherd has raised a $42M Series B, led by Intact Private Capital, the venture arm of one of the world's largest commercial insurers, with continued participation from Spark Capital, Costanoa Ventures, and more. This brings our total funding to $67M.
But this post isn't a press release. I want to tell you why this round matters to us, to our industry, and to the people building the physical infrastructure the world depends on.
The problem we set out to solve
Four years ago, Shepherd was an idea. The thesis was simple: commercial insurance, specifically in construction, was built for a world that moved slowly. Email applications with handwritten exposures, messy spreadsheets and unformatted PDFs. Weeks of back-and-forth between brokers and carriers. Pricing based on data from three years ago and projects that were delivered in entirely different ways.
The world stopped moving slowly. Contractors rapidly adopted software to keep up, and U.S. construction spending began to surge.
The AI infrastructure boom is fueling the largest construction cycle in a generation. The only investment in American history that surpasses it in investment relative to GDP was the Louisiana Purchase. Data centers, semiconductor facilities, utility-scale solar, battery storage — billions going on trillions of dollars in projects that need to get built fast and insured faster. The world needs a new kind of insurer built to meet this moment. But not because carriers don’t want the business. This is one of the most competitive segments in commercial insurance right now; every carrier wants to write AI infrastructure.
The problem is how they write it. Commercial insurance is full of friction. A broker submits a complex construction opportunity and then spends weeks calling, emailing, following up, chasing the carrier for a number. Not a capacity gap. A process gap. A speed gap. A data gap.
We built Shepherd to flip that dynamic.
What we've built
In the last 24 months, we've issued more than 1,500 policies, and covered over $400 billion in insured value. Our customer base includes more than 600 commercial contractors and asset owners, among them some of the most recognized names in AI: from the frontier labs to chip manufacturers, hyperscalers, and the contractors building this infrastructure.
Companies like these choose Shepherd, not because they had no other options, but because we do it with more precision and less friction than anyone else.
Here's what that actually looks like: when a broker submits a complex construction account to Shepherd, we can deliver an indication in minutes. Not weeks. Not days. We don't achieve that speed by cutting corners. We achieve it because our AI is exceptional at taking the emailed submission files and automatically organizing them into structured datasets. Submission in, price out. All in a matter of seconds before an underwriter has even begun their work. But that’s just the beginning. Our platform also ingests real-time data from the tools contractors already use — Procore, Autodesk, DroneDeploy, OpenSpace — and turns that data into underwriting intelligence. We’re looking at the project as it's being built, not at a static application from three weeks ago. This feedback loop makes our pricing sharper, more accurate, and tuned to the actual clients we serve rather than industry benchmarks or broad-brush approaches.
Why Intact leading this round matters
Plenty of venture-backed companies raise Series B rounds. What makes this one different is who led it.
Intact is one of the largest commercial insurers in the world. They have seen every wave of insurtech over the last decade. They know what works and what doesn't in this industry because they are the industry.
When a company like Intact decides not only to invest in Shepherd but to partner with us as a long-term capacity provider, that is a strong signal. It's the insurance industry itself saying: this is where underwriting is going. This is an operating partner who looked at our platform, our loss ratios, our underwriting discipline, and decided this is the future of commercial risk.
That validation means more to me than any valuation headline.
What this capital enables
New products. Renewable energy casualty is live and scaling. Support for more Builder's Risk and Workers’ Compensation are expanding. And Renewable Energy Property is on the way. Every new product line means a broker can do more business with a single partner, and an insured gets a more complete solution.
More underwriters, more capacity. We're hiring production underwriters across the country. More capacity means faster responses, broader risk appetite, and deeper relationships with the brokers who've believed in us from the beginning.
The autonomous underwriting roadmap. This is the part that keeps me up at night, in a good way. We've mapped underwriting to an autonomy framework, similar to self-driving vehicles. Today, an underwriter manually processes around 20 accounts a month. Our two-year path gets them orchestrating 200. AI handles intake, enrichment, analysis, and pricing; the underwriter sets strategy, handles exceptions, and cultivates relationships. We're closing in on the first fully agentic submission intake in commercial insurance: email in, price out, no human intervention until the last mile. A year from now, commercial underwriting will be unrecognizable.
The team that built this
We're nearly 75 people now across five offices. Engineers who left companies like Airbnb, Coinbase, and Amazon to work on one of the hardest AI problems in industry. Underwriters who came from traditional carriers and chose to do something in an entirely new way. An actuarial data science team with backgrounds in complex rating and behavior-based price modeling. A claims and servicing team that picks up the phone when a broker or client has a problem. An operations team that keeps the machine running while we move at startup speed.
Mo and I started this company because we believed commercial insurance could be rebuilt from the ground up for the AI era. The team is the reason that belief turned into a business.
What comes next
We're at an inflection point. The AI infrastructure buildout is accelerating. Data center and Renewable energy demand will be the defining construction cycle of the next decade. At the same time, no shortage of hospitals, schools, and infrastructure projects will also surge ahead. And the insurance market for these industries hasn't changed its operating model in a generation.
We have the platform, the data, the capital, and the team to change that.
For brokers: we're building a carrier that actually moves at your speed. More products, more capacity, more underwriters, and the same responsiveness that made you place your first account with us.
For engineers: if you want to build AI that touches the real world and real economy, where the outcomes are measured in buildings constructed, energy projects completed, and workers protected, come build with us. This is one of the most interesting AI problems in technology, and nobody else is solving it the way we are.
For everyone watching: the distance between Shepherd and the rest of the market is about to get a lot wider.
We're just getting to the interesting part.
— Justin