Meet the insurtech: Foresight

Before there was Foresight, a commercial worker’s compensation insurtech, there was Safesite, a safety management platform and app. The two companies are a part of the Foresight Group, co-founded by long-time friends Peter Grant, CEO of Safesite, and David Fontain, CEO of Foresight.

Grant explains that the death of a friend, in a workplace incident, led the two to start Safesite.

“We wanted to keep that from happening to anyone else,” says Grant. “We built the tech to keep that from happening.”

The Safesite technology works as a virtual safety co-pilot for workers in various industries like construction and manufacturing. For example, if it’s a hot day then the app will send messages about the heat including suggestions about drinking water every hour. If a worker completes the tasks then the app records it and the Safety Score improves.

The score offers real-time incentives to complete safety actions, Grant says. Currently, about 3,000 U.S. companies use the Safesite technology.

Fontain says that a lot of companies were initially using the technology for compliance reasons and for some companies, where safety is important, insurance can be costly if there are loss or injury claims.

“Armed with that knowledge we came up with an idea to encourage companies to be safer and improve their compliance,” says Fontain. “The more we can reduce premiums, the more we can benefit the businesses.”

In 2017, Grant and Fontain opened a brokerage to learn more about opportunities to use Safety Score to help companies, that are impacted by high experience modification rates, reduce insurance costs. The plan was to become an underwriting company. Foresight wrote its first policy in October 2020.

“Mid-market businesses don’t get a lot of attention from traditional insurers and they don’t have our tech, this is something they’ve never seen before,” says Grant. “Our approach provides a bespoke safety success plan for each account.”

Foresight operates in eight states with plans to expand nationally in the next 18 months. The company is also investigating other lines of business where the technology could be useful.

“We are the next generation of insurtech, we are focused on sustainable growth … delivering on the tech and incident reduction,” says Grant.