Automated underwriting insurtech company Juniper Labs announced that it is launching the first-ever open-sourced dataset purpose-built for commercial insurance. Juniper Labs plans to release over 40 million business records it acquired to train its underwriting models for anyone to use. Commercial carriers can use this data to verify an applicant’s information, supplement their own datasets and enhance risk models.
“We are open-sourcing our data because we believe data is not a product. Data is a platform. We are setting out to dramatically change the way the industry views data — we believe the future of insurance is open,” said Lance Poole, Juniper Labs CEO. “We are staunchly committed to an open-source philosophy that allows for solutions to emerge that we could have never created on our own.”
Juniper Labs has given the carrier partners of Plug and Play the first opportunity to use the open dataset. “As we’ve had the privilege of being a part of Plug and Play, we’ve been in a position to see how forward-thinking the partners of Plug and Play are. That’s why we decided to invite the Plug and Play partners to be the anchor members of this open data community,” said John Stevenson, Juniper Labs CTO.
“We’ve worked hard to create an ecosystem that connects the most innovative startups and insurance companies together,” said Eugenio Gonzalez, Co-Director at Plug and Play InsurTech. “We’re thrilled that Juniper Labs picked our Winter Summit for this important announcement and that our partners get the opportunity to steer this open data project. We believe Juniper Lab’s move to open-source will be paradigm-shifting for the insurance industry.”
By moving to an open-source platform, Juniper Labs follows in the footsteps of other tech companies like Databricks, GitLab, MongoDB and Docker. Poole went further to state, “We believe that data in insurance has to be open. We want to establish a data protocol and if everyone is building their own walled gardens, that will never happen. We take a lot of inspiration from the world wide web. Tim Berners-Lee knew that the web would have never reached critical mass if it wouldn’t have been open. We can’t own the data. We can only work with the community to be stewards of the data.”
Carriers and executives interested in Juniper Lab’s open data project are invited to sign up at openjuniper.com
About Juniper Labs:
Founded in 2019, Juniper Labs builds automated underwriting solutions for commercial insurance carriers. They have a suite of APIs that automate the application process and the challenge of properly classifying businesses. They are stewards of OpenJuniper, the first-ever open dataset purpose-built for commercial insurance.