Our Team
People who have worked the submission queue
Everyone at Undwrlyft has either worked inside specialty lines operations or built production document intelligence systems for financial services. The underwriting problems we solve are problems we have personally experienced — which is a different kind of product knowledge than user research can provide.
Leadership
The founding team
Sofia Petersen
Sofia spent eight years in underwriting operations at Hartford specialty lines carriers before co-founding Undwrlyft in 2022. In her final role before leaving, she led an internal workflow initiative that reduced per-submission data entry time by 38% — and identified the ceiling of what was achievable without purpose-built document AI. She holds the CPCU designation and an MBA from the University of Connecticut.
Daniel Okafor
Daniel built document intelligence systems at enterprise fintech companies for eight years before co-founding Undwrlyft. His prior production pipelines processed millions of financial documents annually at sub-second latency. He leads Undwrlyft's extraction engine — the OCR-plus-layout-understanding architecture that distinguishes incurred from paid columns, reconciles multi-year claim histories, and assigns per-field confidence scores.
Renata Vásquez
Renata spent nine years in specialty lines brokerage and MGA operations before joining Undwrlyft. She managed underwriting support teams and led two major policy admin system migrations. She runs every carrier and MGA implementation at Undwrlyft — from field schema mapping through go-live — with a target of 95%+ extraction confidence before any customer goes into production.
James Whitfield
James spent 22 years as a practicing underwriter — professional liability, D&O, and cyber across E&S carriers and Lloyd's syndicates. He knows what a malformed loss run table looks like at 4pm on a Friday with a quote due Monday morning. He joined Undwrlyft to ensure that every product decision holds up against that standard of real-desk scrutiny.
"We are not building a general-purpose document platform that happens to work on insurance PDFs. We are building for the specific claim history reconciliation problems, the specific ACORD gap-filling problems, the specific appetite rule complexity that E&S and specialty lines underwriters face every day. You cannot build that from outside the industry."
— Sofia Petersen, CEO & Co-Founder
Join the team
We are growing. If you have insurance industry experience and want to work on a hard problem with a focused team, we want to talk.