About Undwrlyft
Hartford, 2022. The submission queue was the problem.
Sofia Petersen spent eight years in specialty lines underwriting operations before founding Undwrlyft. She didn't leave to start a startup. She left because the problem was real, the tools didn't exist, and she had seen it in enough shops to know the pattern wasn't unique to one carrier.
The observation that started this company
In 2019, Sofia Petersen was running underwriting operations at a Hartford specialty lines carrier when a broker sent a 94-page submission packet for a professional liability renewal. The account had seven prior carriers across twelve years. Every underwriting assistant on the team spent approximately three hours processing that packet before a single underwriting judgment was made.
The broker called the next morning asking for a quote. The underwriters weren't slow — they were thorough. But two and a half hours of those three had been spent copying incurred loss figures from PDF columns into Excel. That's not underwriting. That's transcription.
By 2022, the document AI tooling had matured to the point where that transcription step could be automated with field-level confidence scoring and full audit trail. Undwrlyft was the product of that observation meeting that timing.
We do not automate underwriting decisions. We automate the document work that happens before those decisions can be made — so the decisions get made by people with the expertise to make them correctly, faster, and with less friction.
How We Work
Four principles that guide every product decision
Underwriter-first design
Every interface decision is reviewed with working underwriters. If it doesn't save time or improve a decision, it doesn't ship.
Judgment stays with the underwriter
Undwrlyft is not a decision engine. It does not recommend accept or decline. It populates the pre-fill, surfaces the anomalies, and then steps back. The underwriter makes every coverage and pricing decision.
Precision over novelty
Extraction accuracy at 94% confidence is more valuable than a novel feature with 70% reliability. We invest in the fundamentals.
Audit trail by default
Insurance is a regulated industry. Every action in Undwrlyft is logged, timestamped, and attributable. Compliance is not an afterthought.
Hartford, Connecticut
The insurance capital of the United States
Hartford has anchored the American property and casualty insurance market for more than 200 years. The institutional knowledge concentrated here — in carriers writing specialty and E&S lines, MGAs, reinsurers, surplus lines brokers, and service providers — is not replicated anywhere else in the country.
We are headquartered at 100 Pearl Street because proximity to the carriers and underwriting professionals we serve is a product advantage, not a marketing statement. Our customers are in the same buildings, at the same TMPAA conferences, and accessible for the kind of working relationship that produces software that actually fits the workflow.
Meet the team behind Undwrlyft
Insurance professionals and engineers, based in Hartford. We talk to working underwriters every week — not at conferences, but at their desks, on their queues, on their actual submissions. That's where product requirements come from.