Why I left insurance to build a construction data company.

Over almost two years of development underwriting I kept running into the same thing: the project already held, or could easily hold, a record of how it was actually being built, and that record was not reaching the risk engineers looking at it.

Not withheld. Not disputed. Simply never offered, and never asked for.

It started with mass timber

The work that made it obvious was trying to improve the insurability of mass timber.

Mass timber is a good test case because the market's difficulty with it is not really about the material. Insurers understand the fire performance reasonably well. What they struggle with is water - moisture ingress during construction, and the damage and delay that follow it - combined with a thin claims history to price against. Aon put it plainly in their own guidance: limited historical data makes it hard to develop comprehensive underwriting practice, and insurers are looking for more evidence of proper project execution than is currently available.

Read that last part again. Not more capital, not better modelling. Evidence of execution.

And the same guidance says what would help: documenting the construction phase in much greater detail, involving risk engineers in site reviews as the build proceeds, proper moisture control and monitoring. Every one of those is something the project can already do, and on a well-run mass timber job, largely already does. The moisture readings exist. The sequence is photographed. Somebody knows when the panels were exposed and for how long.

So here was a type of risk where insurability could be improved with evidence of how the project was actually built - and that data existed but did not travel.

The pattern was not confined to timber

Once I had seen it there I saw it everywhere. Across those two years the shape repeated: projects had, or could easily have had, a record of how they were actually being built, and it was not reaching the risk engineers looking at them. Almost none of it was shared. It was rarely offered and rarely requested.

Water damage is the clearest case. It is routinely cited as the market's biggest cause of loss, the technology is proven and widely deployed, and there is now a joint code of practice for managing escape of water on construction sites. What is missing is any way to see, between site visits, whether what was specified is actually in place and working.

It is worth being clear that this is not anyone behaving badly. The information had no route to travel down, and building one sat outside every existing job description. The insured had no particular reason to imagine that a moisture log or a set of progress photographs was of interest to their insurer, and nobody had told them otherwise. A market that has always worked from proposal forms and periodic surveys does not develop the habit of asking for anything else, and nobody in it had a reason to build the route.

The information sat on one side of a line and the people who needed it sat on the other, and both sides had perfectly reasonable grounds for staying where they were.

The obvious next move, and why it fails

If you want to fix that, the obvious move is to prove the point commercially. Show that projects with continuous site evidence produce better outcomes and the market will pay for the connection.

You cannot. Not now, and not for a long time.

Construction losses split into two kinds, and neither co-operates. Attritional losses - water above all - are frequent enough to measure, and the market has already responded in its own way: deductibles pushed up until much of that cost sits back with the contractor. Whatever monitoring saves there is mostly the insured's own money, which is why the trades that exist are deductible trades. The severe losses - the fires, the collapses, the defects - are what a book is really priced on, and they arrive too rarely and too unalike for any book to isolate what continuous evidence contributed. The frequent losses are retained; the rare ones can't be counted. Either way, there is no published study that isolates the value of visibility on the cover itself.

This is a profound problem if you are trying to launch a product rather than write a think piece. The pitch would be: buy this, and something you cannot measure will improve by an amount I cannot state, on a timescale I cannot promise. That is not a product. It is a hypothesis with an invoice attached, and the market is right to refuse it.

Risk engineering is where the argument closes

Which is why Pikt starts where it does.

Risk engineering is where the value of better site data is direct, immediate and measurable, without waiting for a single loss to occur or not occur.

The measurement is simply coverage. A risk engineering fee is finite - not because anyone worked out what level of oversight would create value across the life of the policy, but because the fee divided by the cost of a survey produces the number of surveys. Frequency is set by the budget rather than by the risk, and between surveys the site is unseen. Connect the technology already running on those sites and the same fee covers every project continuously, with changes flagged as they happen and physical surveys directed where the data says they matter most.

More risk engineering from the same fee. That is a coverage gain you can state at the start of a contract and check at the end of it. No loss study required.

The connection is made once, for the risk engineer. The engineer arrives knowing what has changed rather than discovering it on the day. Where the project already owes progress updates to insurers, the site's own data can assemble them, verified and time-stamped, instead of somebody's recollection compiled on a Friday afternoon.

In a market where almost every proposition asks someone to spend new money on an unproven return, this is an existing budget line, and available now.

What a continuous record is eventually worth beyond risk engineering is a longer conversation, and one the data will have to win on its own terms. It is not what anyone is being asked to buy today.

What I built

Pikt gives risk engineers continuous visibility of the projects they oversee. It connects to the technology already running on site - fixed cameras, 360° walk-throughs, environmental sensors for water, moisture and weather, HSE systems, drone capture and progress tracking - and turns the output into a time-stamped view of each site. No new hardware. Nothing extra for site teams to do.

The engineer still goes to site. That does not change, and it should not: there are things you can only learn standing on the floor. What changes is everything around the visit.

The honest version of why I left

I did not leave because insurance is broken. It works, and the people in it are careful and serious about risk.

I left because of the gap between what a project knows about itself and what the people carrying its risk are able to see - and because the reason for that gap was never difficulty. It was that connecting the two sat outside the existing job descriptions on both sides.

That is a strange thing to keep noticing. It is also, if you are going to build something, a good place to start.