AI Innovations Dominate the 2025 Zurich Innovation Championship

On October 16, 2025, Zurich Insurance Group (Zurich) welcomed startups, industry experts, AI pioneers, customers and investors to its inaugural Innovation Festival. This event sparked new connections and fresh thinking, bringing together some of the brightest minds shaping the future of insurance.

During the Festival, Zurich announced ten winners of the sixth edition of Zurich Innovation Championship 2025 – a global competition, which aims at solving business challenges and meeting new customer demands with technology solutions from startups. The ten winners represent a diverse group: they include the best of the pilots selected for 2025, winners of Zurich's Agentic AI Hyper Challenge earlier this year and some of the most successful alumni from previous championships. The innovators are already working with Zurich, delivering meaningful impact. The winners will have the opportunity to further collaborate with Zurich, bringing their solutions to new markets.

Zurich Innovation Championship 2025 winners

Two winners were selected from the 25 pilots initiated in 2025 for their ability to address critical business problems and deliver measurable impact through pilot collaborations:

• Nexoya provides AI-based analytics to optimize cross-channel marketing strategies. Its insights help our marketing teams reallocate budgets efficiently and maximize campaign effectiveness.
• Optimizely Opal, the agent orchestration platform for marketers, helps organizations create, scale, and personalize digital experiences across multiple channels.

Winners of the Zurich Innovation Championship 2025 Agentic AI Hyper Challenge

Five of the winners of this year’s Championship are the winners of Zurich’s first Agentic AI Hyper Challenge, the largest AI hackathon of its kind in the industry. During the four-week long global challenge earlier this year, more than 1,000 participants from over 40 countries developed breakthrough AI solutions to advance claims, underwriting, finance and marketing.

• AgentricAI’s 'Clara' leverages a coordinated system of AI agents to automate travel claims processing. The solution significantly reduces manual effort while keeping human experts in control of key decisions.
• Interloom’s AI platform intelligently captures and structures organizational knowledge from day-to-day work interactions. This enables Zurich teams and AI agents to collaborate with greater consistency and confidence, leading to more transparent and efficient workflows.
• Wangari Global’s Etio solution employs modular AI agents to automate financial reporting (e.g., IFRS 17). With root cause analysis the platform delivers our finance teams deeper insights for smarter, faster decision-making.
• WordLift’s AI-powered Search Engine Optimization platform analyses Zurich’s websites to boosts AI search visibility and enhances user experience for visitors.
• ZuriFault, developed by a cross functional Zurich team, is an Agentic AI solution which speeds up and enhance our motor liability decisions.

Zurich Innovation Championship Alumni winners

Finally, three former winners were also featured at the Festival and awarded for their continued impact delivered across Zurich’s global operations. These startup collaborations with Zurich are now scaling their proven solutions into new markets:

• Lisa Insurtech is an AI-powered platform that automates every step of the health claims process. Since collaborating with Zurich in 2022, it has cut claims turnaround times and enabled efficient processing of more than one million claims per year.
• Nearmap, a leader in aerial imagery and AI analytics, has worked with Zurich North America and Farmers Insurance®¹. Nearmap’s advanced imagery, in combination with their Betterview platform, helps to identify property characteristics and hazards. This technology enables better eligibility decisions during the underwriting process and improves risk modeling to more accurately price rate to risk.
• Sixfold’AI platform transforms the way we work do underwriting in Commercial Insurance. We move from hours of processing documents to only minutes, so that our underwriters can focus on higher order tasks and customers and brokers interaction.

Learn more about all the winners of the Agentic AI Hyper Challenge here, and find out more about the Zurich Innovation Championship here.

Watch the full Innovation Festival here.

¹ "Farmers Insurance®" is a tradename for a group of insurers providing insurance for automobiles, homes, small businesses and a wide range of other insurance and financial services products. Farmers Group, Inc. and certain of its subsidiaries, all wholly owned subsidiaries of the Zurich Insurance Group, provide certain non-claims services and ancillary services to the Farmers Exchanges as their attorney-in-fact and receive fees for their services. Zurich Insurance Group has no ownership interest in the Farmers Exchanges.