Guest blog from Tom Philp, Founder at MaxInfo
I was nine when I experienced my first hurricane. As Hurricane Erin barrelled toward the Florida coastline, I spent the night glued to the weather channel. I remember emergency responders outside, radar looping, questions piling up. This event sparked the beginning of my journey into the study of tropical cyclones, catastrophe risk management, and ultimately founding Maximum Information (MaxInfo).
Early curiosity and academic rigour
I studied hurricanes and atmospheric perils seriously. Stints with NOAA in Miami, where I had the chance to fly through the storms I had come to revere, were followed by a PhD. These experiences brought me deep into the science of hazard observation and modelling. But something started bothering me. In academia, the work was rigorous, even elegant — but the real-world impact often felt distant.
A chance encounter with a brilliant astrophysicist-turned-reinsurance leader led me to accept a role in industry, and with that make the move from science to application. At Catlin, I became immersed in catastrophe modelling, underwriting and reinsurance. But I saw two consistent frustrations:
- Highly trained people drowning in manual processes, such as data cleaning, ingestion, formatting, rather than improving the real decision-making.
- Modelling frameworks that limited agility, stifled innovation and left little room for alternative approaches.
The leap to founder
After seven years and successive acquisitions, the small-team autonomy I loved at Catlin had eroded and the bureaucracy of large corporate life had slowly crept in. Honestly, that growing frustration was the nudge I needed. It forced the question: keep adapting within the system, or build something new?
Those first two years weren’t glamorous. Contracting. Exploring. Talking to reinsurers. Validating the pain points. But by 2022 I was confident the problems I had experienced were systemic and I knew there was a market for a suite of objective tools that could help users make well-informed, subjective decisions.
Some people I spoke to didn’t understand why I had taken the risk and left a “safe” job to step into the unknown, build a team, raise money. But the excitement of creating real impact far outweighed any fear and that energy still drives me today.
Meet MaxInfo
Here’s the problem: Extreme events are imperfectly managed and increasing, protection gaps are widening, and users of catastrophe models face growing pressure — from regulators, investors, boards — to own their views of risk, from which they can reliably quantify and respond to catastrophes as and when they occur. Default vendor models alone provide the data, they don’t provide the analytical capabilities, and in-house solutions are expensive, slow and often rigid.
Our solution: At MaxInfo we’ve developed the first vendor-agnostic middleware for catastrophe risk analytics. It offers a flexible and transparent interface that sits between model vendors and model users to give them greater autonomy over catastrophe risk transfer decisions. It streamlines workflows, opens the field to alternative models and data, and enables tailored analytics aligned with each client’s risk profile and appetite. That means smarter decisions, stronger oversight and, ultimately, greater societal resilience.
Making Progress
We launched our MVP, MagniPhi, in 2024. Early adopter clients didn’t just buy; they collaborated. They gave us benchmarks to work towards like: “If you can speed up our monthly climate reporting, we’ll sign up.” Or: “We’re switching models, we want you to help us automate the regulatory reporting.” And so we worked with them for six to eight months to turn those pain points into product features.
Our journey has also been supercharged by working closely with Lloyd’s over the past few years. Alongside collaborative projects, we were invited to join Cohort 12 of the Lloyd’s Lab accelerator to help the market tackle one of its biggest headaches: improving both the efficiency and efficacy of regulatory and investor reporting for catastrophe risk. Every (re)insurer must frequently explain to regulators how their view of risk is built, and what that means for their capital management and forward-looking business strategy. This is a process that is painfully manual. Working alongside Lloyd’s teams, we built tools to help automate and standardise that reporting, reducing months of effort to days.
That project proved that our platform could not only streamline internal workflows, but also begin to encourage shared standards for the wider market. This potential for standardisation has also laid the groundwork for improved collaboration across disaster risk impacted sectors.
We’ve grown our specialist team to 14 people with deep reinsurance experience, won several Innovate UK grants, attracted strategic investment through convertible loan notes, and now have Insurtech Gateway leading our £2.3 million Seed round. This growth, in a relatively short time, is a signal we’ve built something meaningful.
Why Insurtech Gateway matters
Insurtech Gateway are brilliant. Their feedback is always incredibly constructive, and allows us to rapidly refine our strategy. They understand the market we’re tackling, the model we’re trying to break, and the plan behind it — and approached it as a genuine partnership from day one. Since then they’ve made key introductions, brought in fresh perspectives, and stayed hands-on in the best possible way. We chose them to lead our round because they know this space inside-out and having their guidance has been invaluable.
What’s next
The next phase for MaxInfo is to extend that transparency, standardisation and risk-insight access far beyond insurance. We’re currently developing new tools that can help build connection across public agencies, humanitarian responders, financial institutions and governments disaster response by providing one unified evidence base. Our ultimate goal is to build an open ecosystem for catastrophe and disaster risk management, where decisions are coordinated, efficient, and defensible.
Our vision: risk transfer on-demand. Model-agnostic. Sector-agnostic. Everyone sees the same numbers, same uncertainties, same path to resilience.
If you’re working toward the same goals, we’d love to connect on LinkedIn. Collaboration is how we’ll create new, resilient markets — together.
Advice to fellow founders
From one founder to another:
- Know the subject matter and the market. Expertise without a go-to‐market is a dead end; vice-versa is snake oil.
- Build with users, not for them. Early adopters who tell you “we’ll pay if you do X” are gold.
- Trust takes time. This industry is slow-moving by design. Hire people who’ve been in it, they will get you where you want to go faster.
- Start from the decision you want to improve and work out the analytics you need. I see so many experts obsessed with creating perfect models, but if the model doesn’t give you an answer tailored to the specific decision a risk manager needs to make, then all of that time and energy is wasted.
If you’re a risk expert or insurance professional frustrated by legacy systems, opaque models or rigid frameworks, consider this your nudge. You might be the one to fix it.
A note from Insurtech Gateway
Thank you for sharing your story, Tom. We’re proud to be supporting MaxInfo, a venture reshaping how catastrophe and climate risk are understood across the insurance ecosystem and beyond.
At Insurtech Gateway, we back founders who see the system differently — experts like Tom who bring deep domain insight and the courage to challenge convention. These are the people redefining how risk is measured, mitigated, and managed.
If you’re building a new model, platform, or digital infrastructure that can help close a protection gap, we’d love to hear from you. With capital, regulatory support, and hands-on venture building experience, we can help you launch and scale faster.
Explore our incubator and venture fund, or get in touch to start the conversation.