Avg. age, cyber underwriter
54
The average cyber underwriter is 54. The average new hire is not coming.
Virtual cyber underwriter
The world's first virtual cyber underwriter.
Built for the cyber desks where the work is drowning the people left to do it.
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SOC 2 read · controls mapped · underwriting memo with citations
The problem
Cyber underwriting is breaking.
Days to quote, cyber
8 / 21
Cyber submissions take 8 to 21 days to quote. Brokers route around carriers that cannot keep up.
Cyber loss ratio, industry
71%
Industry cyber loss ratios are still above 70%. Better selection is worth more than better pricing.
Why cyber
A cyber submission is not a stack of insurance documents.
It is a stack of security artifacts. SOC 2 reports run 80 to 200 pages. Pen test findings come in vendor-specific formats. Attack surface data is a live feed. Breach history requires reading dark web intelligence. The application is the easiest part.
To underwrite cyber properly, you need someone who can read a SOC 2 control by control and map it to your appetite. Who knows the difference between MFA on email and MFA on privileged accounts. Who can tell whether the EDR coverage actually matches what was attested. Who reads the incident response section as a forecast, not a checkbox.
Hugo is built for that work. Not as a generalist platform that happens to handle cyber. As a security-native underwriter that handles cyber the way the best humans do.
What Hugo handles
Hugo is not software. Hugo is a virtual underwriter.
It receives submissions over email the way a human underwriter does. It reads. It cites. It writes the memo and the broker email. You review and approve.
01
Submission triage and clearance
Reads incoming submissions the moment they hit the inbox. Parses the application, supplementals, SOC 2, pen tests, and attack surface data. Maps every control to your appetite and underwriting guidelines. Flags missing artifacts and inconsistencies between what was attested and what was tested.
02
Risk analysis and underwriting memo
Cross-references the insured's security posture against the application, the broker's narrative, and prior loss history. Identifies coverage gaps, suspicious responses, and material changes from prior year. Produces a full underwriting memo with every conclusion cited to a specific control, finding, or document page.
03
Quote generation and broker correspondence
Drafts the quote, terms, conditions, and exclusion endorsements. Writes the broker email. Answers broker questions over the same thread. Escalates to the human underwriter only when judgment is genuinely required.
How it works
A teammate, not a tool.
There's no UI to learn. Hugo is a fully virtual underwriter with its own seat in your org chart.
01 / Communicates like a teammate
Email, Teams, Slack, phone
Brokers send submissions to hugo@yourcarrier.com. They get responses the same day, in the same thread, signed by the same name.
02 / Uses your existing software
Your stack, Hugo's identity
Your policy admin system, your underwriting workbench, your appetite guide, your rate filings, and your security data feeds (BitSight, SecurityScorecard, RiskRecon, CyberCube). Hugo gets a seat, an identity in your org chart, and full audit logs. No new software for your team to adopt.
03 / Learns your appetite
Walk it through
Walk Hugo through your underwriting guidelines on a video call. It asks questions. It replays its reasoning on real submissions until it underwrites the way your senior people do. Then it scales.
Why this, why now
We built Hugo because the specialty underwriting desk is the highest-leverage seat in insurance, and the industry is running out of people who can sit in it.
Every CUO we have spoken to describes the same thing: a queue of submissions they cannot staff, a pipeline of underwriters that does not exist, and a broker community that is losing patience.
The work is too complex to outsource and too document-heavy to brute-force with offshore teams. It needs a partner that can read like an underwriter, reason like an underwriter, and document its work like an underwriter.
That is what Hugo is.
Cyber is where we start. Tech E&O, D&O, and the rest of professional liability follow. The virtual specialty underwriter is the future of how this work gets done. Cyber is where we earn the right to build it.
About
About Hugo.
Noah Kanji
Co-founder and CEO
Noah leads Hugo's go-to-market and product strategy. He spends most of his week in calls with chief underwriting officers, MGA principals, and wholesale brokers, mapping where the desk actually breaks under volume.
Zayan Hussain
Co-founder and CTO
Zayan leads Hugo's engineering and AI systems. He works on the document understanding stack: how Hugo reads long submissions, grounds every conclusion in citations, and produces underwriting memos that stand up to audit.
Design partners
Book a demo.
We are working with a small number of design partners. If you run a cyber desk and the backlog is keeping you up at night, we want to hear from you.