Shepherd, an insurance technology platform for the commercial industry, has successfully completed a $42 million Series B round of financing led by Intact Private Capital, with participation from Spark Capital, Costanoa Ventures and other investors.
The new capital is designed to support the team’s expansion, driven by growing demand for faster, more precise underwriting solutions in construction and other industries that rely heavily on physical assets.
Founded in 2021, the company is an AI-powered insurance platform for builders and operators that has grown nearly 7x in the past 24 months and has raised $67 million to date.
It serves more than 600 clients with more than 1,500 policies, insuring more than $400 billion worth of projects, including the physical infrastructure behind the best-known brands in artificial intelligence. The company’s customers include leading AI labs, chip manufacturers, hyperscalers, general contractors, specialty builders and energy developers who build facilities that form the physical foundation of the AI economy.
In the early 2020s, commercial insurance entered its toughest market in decades, with sharp premium increases due to general rate hikes rather than targeted adjustments.
At the same time, U.S. investment in infrastructure and data centers has surged—hundreds of billions of dollars in the past five years and trillions of dollars projected—and these projects need to be built and insured.
But the traditional carrier model was not designed for the speed of these projects, exposing how poorly the traditional insurance system is able to cope with modern rapid developments.
“The AI race has moved from the cloud to the construction site. Every GPU cluster needs a building. Every building needs to be built. Every data center needs dedicated power,” said Justin Levine, CEO and co-founder of Shepherd. The insurance markets that are supposed to keep these programs running have been operating the same way for decades.
“We built Shepherd because we believed the old approach to commercial underwriting needed to fundamentally change—not just to become faster, but to become smarter. That’s why the giants in AI infrastructure chose us.”
Shepherd was built to address long wait times and inconsistent underwriting results, according to the company.
Its AI technology can perform the same workflow in seconds, reducing underwriting feedback from weeks to hours. The platform also integrates real-time data from partners like Procore and Autodesk into underwriting, which allows them to assess risk faster than traditional carriers using static applications.
Shepherd sees the actual delivery of the project: incident tracking, quality inspection rates, document management and job site conditions are constantly updated.
Leveraging these partnerships, data and artificial intelligence platform, it can offer differentiated pricing to insureds through its unique Shepherd Savings program, which uses actual construction technology adoption and jobsite data to reward builders who invest in safety and operational excellence.
Shepherd insures the physical infrastructure building data centers, semiconductor facilities and energy assets for leading artificial intelligence and technology companies; the company emphasizes that it was chosen by clients because it provides faster, more accurate and less frictional underwriting in a highly competitive market.
Shepherd is pursuing what the company describes as the most ambitious technology vision in commercial insurance: fully autonomous underwriting.
“We believe the future of commercial insurance is behavior-based,” Levine said. “Contractors who invest in technology to build safer, smarter buildings should be rewarded for it, rather than being priced the same as everyone else.”
The company envisions a shift from manual processes to an AI-driven future, where entire workflows are managed by AI, allowing underwriters to move from data entry roles to workflow orchestrators.
“We charted the same autonomous trajectory that transformed self-driving cars and applied it to underwriting,” said Mo Mahalawy, chief technology officer and co-founder of Shepherd. “Today, underwriters manually process about 20 accounts per month and waste a lot of time on more submissions than they can stomach. In our model, underwriters will oversee 200. AI handles intake, data enrichment, risk analysis and pricing. Underwriters strategize, manage exceptions, and focus on the most important accounts.”
Shepherd is on the road to two-year oversight autonomy, with underwriters becoming portfolio orchestrators rather than processors, achieving a 10x increase in capacity.
“We are closing in on the first fully agent submission in commercial insurance,” Mahalawi said. “Sent by email, priced. No human intervention until the last mile. No other commercial carrier can make that statement. In a year, commercial underwriting will be unrecognizable.”
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