Sapiens adds sales veteran to accelerate Americas growth and AI push

Sapiens is signaling that the Americas remain a growth market worth rebuilding, not a mature base to merely protect. The insurance software vendor named Kellen Petersen as executive vice president of sales, Americas, putting a seasoned P&C operator in charge of revenue growth and go-to-market execution across North and Latin America at a moment when carriers are demanding clearer ROI from every modernization dollar.

Petersen brings more than 15 years of experience across P&C and enterprise technology. He joins from KatRisk, where he was executive vice president and global head of sales, and previously served as vice president of risk data solutions at Swiss Re, helping drive new revenue growth across the U.S. and Canada. He also held a senior sales leadership role at National General Insurance Company, an Allstate company. Based in Washington, DC, Petersen will report to James Hannay, Sapiens’ chief revenue officer, and lead a unified sales and pre-sales organization across the Americas.

The hire lands in the middle of a broader push by Sapiens to position itself as an AI-centric, SaaS-based insurance software provider. The company has been leaning into agentic workflows across policy, underwriting, claims, reinsurance, decisioning, finance and compliance, a product story aimed squarely at insurers that want more than isolated automation. For carriers weighing core replacements or major modernization programs, that matters: the market is no longer rewarding feature parity alone, and vendors have to show faster implementations, measurable productivity gains and AI controls that fit regulated insurance processes.

Sapiens also framed the appointment alongside a string of strategic moves that make the Americas push more consequential. The company said it recently received a minority investment from a wholly owned subsidiary of the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, launched its Insurance Agentification program and opened an AI Customer Experience Lab at its London headquarters in Holborn’s Space House. It also said the ADIA investment, announced on June 1, 2026, marked another step in its growth under Advent’s ownership and its AI strategy for insurance.

That ownership shift is substantial. Advent agreed to acquire Sapiens for $43.50 per share in an all-cash transaction valuing the company at about $2.5 billion, and the deal closed on December 17, 2025. Since then, Sapiens has continued to talk up scale, saying it serves more than 600 insurance customers in 38 countries and employs 5,265 experts. The company reported second-quarter 2025 revenue of $141.6 million, up 3.5% year over year, then followed with third-quarter revenue of $152 million and double-digit North America growth.

In that context, Petersen’s arrival is more than a regional staffing move. It is a bet that the next round of insurance software competition in the Americas will be won by vendors that can combine product breadth, regional sales muscle and proof that AI can move from promise into production-grade workflows.