Federato expands into Asia-Pacific with AI-native underwriting platform

Federato is planting its first permanent Asia-Pacific office in Sydney and putting former Guidewire executive Roland Slee in charge of the push across APAC and Japan. The company is starting with carriers and managing general agents writing commercial lines in Australia and New Zealand, then plans to extend into Singapore, Japan and Korea.

That is a sharper test than a routine market entry. Federato was founded in 2020 and has spent the last two years building an AI-native underwriting story around RiskOps, its operating framework for submission triage, appetite alignment, quote prioritization and portfolio steering. Federato says its platform spans the full policy lifecycle, and its website claims a 5.5x increase in high-appetite bound policies, 93% fewer systems used and an eight-week timeline to launch a new product. The company had raised a total of $80 million by Nov. 20, 2024, then added $100 million in Series D funding in November 2025.

The Sydney move also puts a seasoned distribution operator in the room. Guidewire said Slee joined in Sydney in June 2019 after serving as managing director for Asia-Pacific at Bravura Solutions, where he led cloud-platform sales across the region and helped steer the business through Bravura’s 2016 ASX IPO. That background matters because Federato is not just selling software into APAC, it is trying to win underwriting teams that already live inside complex carrier-core environments. Guidewire also named Shaji Sethu as senior vice president and managing director, APAC, on June 5, 2024, a sign that the region is already crowded with vendors chasing the same modernization budgets.

Federato’s pitch lands in a market where the pressure is real. Gallagher Re’s 2025 APAC Market Watch said insurers in the region are accelerating digital transformation, including AI-powered underwriting, while the Insurance Council of Australia has pointed to rising disaster costs and insurance taxes as major industry issues. Guidewire has separately described Australia and New Zealand, Japan and India as distinct priority markets in APAC, and said nearly 70% of claims in Australia and around 60% of claims in Japan were processed through its platform, underscoring how established the region already is for core-system vendors.

Federato has been telegraphing this direction for a while. In 2023, it teamed up with Google Cloud to embed new AI capabilities into RiskOps, and now it is taking that product message into a region where underwriters want faster, more consistent decisions without a full core replacement. The Sydney office says Federato believes APAC is ready for direct field execution, not just remote sales.