Arbol appoints Dr. Clement Atzberger to Chief Scientist to launch Innovation Unit. Oct 6, 2026 Dr. Atzberger will lead the modeling, data and research infrastructure beneath Arbol's specialty risk business to expand range of coverage. Arbol, the AI-native insurer, today appointed Dr. Clement Atzberger to the role of Chief Scientist and launched its Innovation Unit under his direction. The unit will lead the development of foundational modeling, data and underwriting research that will act as a foundational intelligence layer beneath Arbol's specialty risk products, expanding the range of risks Arbol can price and write. The Arbol Innovation Unit, led by Dr. Atzberger in his role as Chief Scientist, will support underwriting across Arbol's specialty lines, including agriculture, energy, wildfire and flood - closing protection gaps for difficult to price risks. With a particular focus on agriculture initially, Dr. Atzberger will drive advanced modeling that can support increased weather and yield protection products that cover gaps standard insurance policies leave open, or where businesses currently face tedious hurdles around claims settlement processes. Arbol builds catastrophe models and prices fourteen perils on models developed in-house, while most insurers continue to price catastrophe risk on models licensed from outside vendors. The primary perils include yield, flood and wildfire, calibrated against years of live underwriting outcomes. With the launch of the Innovation Unit, Arbol connects its models, the data pipelines that maintain model accuracy, and the underwriting research that connects model output to pricing and contract terms. Atzberger is a remote sensing scientist with over three decades of experiences leading research initiatives. As part of a team of scientists, Dr. Atzberger was instrumental in producing TESSERA, a data model that converts raw radar and optical satellite time series into AI-ready representations of the status of a land surface. This data can be used to show how land changes over time at 10-meter resolution globally, and enables insurers to understand and price climate risk with greater clarity, as well as provides critical data for climate researchers, farmers, carbon and restoration projects, and developers to turn specialized, resource-intensive processes into easily accessible data and information. Additional information around the launch of TESSERA from dClimate - the climate data infrastructure used by Arbol - and Amazon Web Services can be read here. "In academia, you are usually done with a model once it is accurate enough to publish," said Atzberger. "Insurance demands more, because someone has to be willing to pay a claim on what the data says, and that is a big part of why I came here. Many of the risks Arbol writes are ones other carriers decline because the data they have was never good enough to price on. The work of our unit is to keep improving the models and the data behind underwriting decisions, so that more of what gets declined today becomes something we can write." "Foundation models are becoming widely available, and we were glad to help make TESSERA one of them," said Sid Jha, founder and CEO of Arbol. "With its team of leading quants, scientists and engineers, led by Dr. Atzberger, Arbol Inc. is able to calibrate models against real underwriting outcomes, closing critical coverage gaps and pricing climate risk with greater accuracy and efficiency than before. About Arbol. Arbol is a vertically integrated insurer that underwrites and prices risk, and provides the capacity and reinsurance solutions behind it. This is done across markets exposed to drought, flood, wildfire, storm wind and other weather perils. Founded in 2018 and headquartered in New York, Arbol runs a licensed insurer, a reinsurance platform and an owned agency network on the same proprietary models and operating core, connecting customers directly to the capital that stands behind their coverage. It underwrites primary property and casualty risk through Lilypad, its admitted carrier licensed in Florida, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, North Carolina, Hawaii and Virginia, and specialty risk across property, agriculture and energy. Arbol prices fourteen perils on models built in-house, is licensed in all 50 states and writes in more than 15 countries. Related Arbol insights. Get its latest updates + industry insights. Arbol Inc. cover all things related to climate risk management. You can opt-out of these emails at any time.

New York, NY - June 18, 2025 - dClimate today announced the official launch of dClimate Labs, a new enterprise product company built to translate dClimate's open infrastructure into scalable, trusted tools for real-world climate intelligence.