(Image source: CompScience.)

Earlier this week, we reported on CompScience Insurance Services’ (San Francisco) MGA agreement with Nationwide (Columbus, Ohio) and Swiss Re (Zurich) to underwrite, bind and service workers’ compensation policies. Our interest in the story led us to follow up with the company to arrange an exchange with founder and CEO Josh Butler. CompScience offers what it characterizes as a better workers’ comp policy that incentivizes companies who leverage its video analytics-based safety programs which use computer vision models to detect more than 50 behavioral and environmental hazards. Part of CompScience’s value proposition is that it enables agents to win new and remediate distressed clients with CompScience’s unique software-only risk-assessment solution, according to Butler.

Before founding the CompScience, Butler relates that he was building self-driving car perception analytics when his family member was injured on a construction site. He founded CompScience in 2019 to take that perception technology and apply it to workplace safety and now has 20 employees. Insurers immediately started using the software to improve their loss control services, and the idea for CompScience Workers Compensation was born. The company has enjoyed five-fold growth during the last year, based on rapid growth of both its software sales and insurance commissions.

The company currently has 50 customers and announced a seed funding round of $6 million in Aug. 2022. Butler talks about a “blue ocean opportunity” to improve safety management across millions of businesses, which fits CompScience’s long-term vision to “put a huge dent in workplace injury rates globally.”

Insurance Innovation Reporter: How would you describe where CompScience is today in terms of its trajectory, and what has the recent seed round enabled you to do?

Josh Butler, CEO and Founder, CompScience: We took that investment to build out our MGA and enhance our network of superstar producers who now use our software to win big accounts in the $100 to $1.5M premium range.

IIR: How would you characterize the significance of your collaboration with Nationwide and Swiss Re?

JB: SwissRe and Nationwide are two visionary teams who are the perfect launch partners for our new workers’ compensation product. They provide top echelon claims services, AM Best A+ rated capacity and paper, and a deep bench of analytics and actuarial support. We’ve been working together since 2021 and this announcement is just the start of our long term vision to put a huge dent in workplace injury rates globally.

IIR: Are you working as a distributor with other carriers?

JB: We also work with AmTrust, CompWest, and The Hartford.

IIR: From a technology perspective, CompScience’s innovation proposition is largely about computer vision technology. Explain how that works and how important it is for your market differentiation.

JB: Video data is the next wave of IOT that is a thousand bigger than telematics or wearables. It’s also a hundred times harder to process and interpret. However, when you solve that data problem, you get full context on the hazards and activities that lead to injury in a way that no other technology can do.

IIR: As much as technology enables CompScience’s particular value proposition, is it fair to say that it does so by enabling a kind of risk management cooperation with policyholder?

JB: Absolutely. We reward customers who are ready to lean in on protecting their workers and we invest an order of magnitude more in their success. At inception we onboard them onto the safety manager software platform and have regular check-ins with them around executive level risk reports.

IIR: Today we’re seeing new forms of collaboration between insurer and policyholder to assess risk and intervene to prevent loss. As someone who enjoys driving, I’m convinced that most car accidents are preventable. I suspect that’s probably the great majority of accidents of any type. What do you see as the market opportunity of prevention in workers’ compensation?

JB: There are huge opportunities to prevent injuries. OSHA studies have shown that the vast majority of U.S. injuries and deaths are preventable. A big piece of the opportunity here is to bring our safety analytics to the middle market which has limited resources to purchase software but does buy workers’ compensation. That’s a blue ocean opportunity to uplevel safety management across millions of businesses.

CompScience Collaborates with Nationwide and Swiss Re on AI-Driven Workers’ Comp Product