“At the time, I was semi-retired and knew the investors and they asked me to come in and take a look and provide some advice on the business, which I did,” Oslan recalled. “They subsequently asked me to stay on and run it.”
Arturo formally announced Oslan’s appointment as CEO on Sept. 1, noting he’ll be responsible, in part, for leading Arturo “through a new period of growth, expanding across industries and building further on Arturo’s technical capabilities.”
Oslan brings a track record of building and leading organizations and companies to market and exit in areas including AI, cybersecurity, IT, capital management and government initiatives. He was chairman and/or CEO of companies including RiskSense (sold to Avanti) and Narus (sold to Boeing). In addition, he led commercial efforts in standing up both the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) in Silicon Valley and the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC) at the Pentagon.
At Arturo, Oslan succeed John-Isaac (“jC”) Clark, an entrepreneur who had led Arturo since its spinout in 2018. Arturo made no mention of Clark in its announcement about Oslan. The company’s new CEO, in turn, declined to discuss if Clark was asked to step down.
“We’re not going to comment on any of the past or any personnel transitions as there have been and will be more,” Oslan said. “The business is transitioning itself … employees, writ large, are transitioning as we look to needing different skills to get us to that scalable point.”
Asked to explain further, Oslan said there was “no push to change” but that the board decided the company had reached “a transition point.”
Arturo has raised $33 million from its combined Series A and B rounds to support its use of machine learning and artificial intelligence models to analyze property images, largely for the property/casualty insurance industry. The Chicago-based company currently employs roughly 75 people.
Arturo has made progress since its launch, but its leaders are turning their focus toward scaling the company’s operations, Oslan explained.
“Everything that everybody did up to now they did right, because we’re here talking to you and we’re very fortunate to have the success that we have,” Oslan said. “In order to scale and grow a business to where it needs to get to, a normal transition point occurred. We’re transitioning as a business from one that has great technology and great anchor customers to one that is moving toward a product business. We’re looking for repeatability and scale.”
Opportunity in diving deeper
Arturo focuses on residential insurance claims underwriting and risks in the United States and Australia, and Oslan wants the company to mine those markets more aggressively.
“Our goals remain [to] go deeper in those two markets in terms of acquiring more customers and scaling with our existing customers,” Oslan said. “We’re fortunate that we have a 100% renewal rate with all customers … we want to be successful defining whatever market share we choose in those two markets and once we do there will be expansion beyond…”
Clark, earlier this year, had said he was pursuing an expansion into the mortgage industry, for which property imaging is also a useful tool. Oslan called that an “opportunity” and a “white space that we could choose to go after” but referred to the mortgage sector as “a future exploration category.”
Oslan would not discuss how many customers Arturo has, other than noting the number is between 10 and 20. Customers include USAA, Openly and LexisNexis, he said. American Family is also a customer, and it remains an investor.
Integration options, long-term plans
Arturo is in the process of building its future plans, with a focus so far on maintaining its 100% renewal rate and scaling. The company has also worked to address spending.
Oslan said its cash burn rate has been appropriate in “some of the business” but “too much” in other sections. That has been addressed, he said, during his first five months on the job.
Oslan and Arturo are pushing to offer customers the choice of buying all of its technology or just the pieces that it needs. The idea is to be much less rigid compared to how the company marketed and sold its technology in the past.
“We believe our success isn’t just imagery,” he said, noting the company also generates information and data from satellites and other sources – all of which can be used in different ways.
The newly launched Arturo Connect enables increased customer choices. It uses an API that lets customers easily plug Arturo’s property characteristics data into their workflows.
“You buy what you want, when you need it … [and you] don’t get everything if you don’t want the complete system,” Oslan said.
The product is designed to be cost-effective and configurable, with four attribute tiers from which individual carriers can select, based on their use case and budget, the company said. Each user can also request only the attributes they need for their given use case.
It is also very easy to integrate with customers, Oslan said.
“Step one, you go talk to the customer and you listen to that customer and what they need. Step two, once you see what they need, then you work with them to understand how they need to receive the information. Step three is you get it to them and you test, and once that works – step four is they use it and everybody’s happy,” Oslan said.
That process can take a few weeks or months, depending on how complex and sophisticated the material is in the integration process.
With Arturo Connect and other initiatives, Oslan said the company by year-end should become twice as large as it is today in terms of accounts, ongoing and new revenue.
