As Australian insurers absorb the financial weight of the country’s most expensive year for extreme weather on record, IAG’s corporate venture capital arm has placed a new round of investments that reveal where the industry’s largest domestic insurer believes the next cycle of risk and product change is heading.
Firemark Ventures has completed investments in five companies: autonomous logistics firm Gatik, cloud-based insurance software provider Socotra, parametric insurtech Adaptive Insurance, quantum computing company BlueQubit, and carbon-negative materials producer DexMat. The portfolio spans near-term underwriting questions with live regulatory dimensions and longer-horizon bets on technologies expected to reshape industrial risk profiles.
Firemark Ventures manages approximately $170 million and has made 62 investments across 28 portfolio companies, with 26 commercial agreements between those companies and IAG. The fund has operated since 2016. Scott Gunther, its general partner, said the portfolio reflects a deliberate focus on companies operating at the intersection of insurance and emerging risk. “These investments reflect where we see the next evolution of insurance taking shape. Our mandate is to partner with companies building at the frontier of change, supporting their growth while strengthening IAG’s ability to anticipate risk, respond to disruption, and deliver more relevant solutions for customers,” Gunther said.
The Adaptive Insurance investment arrives as Australia’s catastrophe loss profile puts mounting pressure on the pace and structure of traditional indemnity claims. Insurers handled 294,000 claims from declared extreme weather events in 2025, with average costs per claim jumping 39% to $16,471. The Insurance Council of Australia (ICA) recorded almost $3.5 billion in insured losses across those events, with Ex-Tropical Cyclone Alfred alone generating more than 132,000 claims and $1.5 billion in losses.
Parametric insurance – which pays a pre-agreed sum when a defined trigger is met, such as a specific wind speed or rainfall threshold, without requiring a damage assessment – has gained attention at the highest levels of Australia’s insurance and research community as a result. At the UNSW Institute for Climate Risk & Response Industry Forum, a Swiss Re representative highlighted parametric insurance as one of the promising financial tools that can help communities recover more quickly from extreme weather-related impacts by paying out when specific, independently verified conditions are met. ICA chief insurance officer Kate Lyons, speaking at the same forum, noted that decade on decade, the costs of extreme weather are increasing, and that Australia’s geography exposes it to a wide range of natural perils – from floods and cyclones to bushfires – compounded by the nation’s development patterns.
In 2025, parametric solutions were deployed across forestry, real estate, agriculture, transportation, entertainment, and hospitality in Australia and New Zealand, addressing protection gaps where traditional insurance capacity was constrained or unavailable. Adaptive Insurance targets AI-powered parametric products specifically for climate-related disruptions, including power grid failures. IAG said the investment provides exposure to next-generation risk-transfer models.
The Gatik investment, co-supported by FM Capital, positions IAG ahead of a regulatory transition that carries direct underwriting implications. Gatik operates autonomous trucks for middle-mile logistics and is already commercially deployed in the US, but Australia’s framework governing autonomous vehicles (AVs) remains in development.
On November 21, 2025, Transport Ministers agreed to allow the conditional deployment of automated vehicles from 2027 in selected locations, with full national readiness dependent on each state and territory updating its legislation. The liability settings that will apply remain unresolved. Existing motor accident injury insurance schemes, based on the principle of a human driver, will need significant revision to ensure victims of AV-related accidents can access compensation, with the introduction of AVs expected to shift liability from individual drivers to manufacturers, software developers, and operators – requiring new fleet insurance models and increased cyber liability coverage.
IAG said the Gatik investment strengthens its position to lead the emerging autonomous transport insurance market in Australia and New Zealand.
The Socotra investment addresses a structural challenge now attracting explicit regulatory scrutiny. Socotra provides cloud-based, API-driven core insurance software designed to help insurers migrate away from legacy platforms. The Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) has observed that many of the banks, insurers, and superannuation trustees it supervises rely heavily on legacy systems, which often fall short of modern requirements for encryption, segregation, user access, authentication, and real-time monitoring – increasing both cyber vulnerability and operational risk. KPMG’s 2026 General Insurance Insights identifies legacy system modernisation as a priority across the Australian general insurance sector, with digital and AI investments being directed toward simplifying complex technology architecture and automating manual processes.
BlueQubit and DexMat represent longer time horizons, each grounded in a documented dynamic relevant to the insurance sector. On quantum computing, the Actuaries Institute – the peak professional body for actuaries in Australia – has identified specific applications in insurance. Actuarial calculations most likely to benefit from quantum parallelism include modelling the effects of climate change on insurance premiums at an individual household level, modelling optimal investment portfolios based on historical return data, and advancing AI applications. IAG said the BlueQubit investment could support future work in catastrophe modelling, pricing, underwriting, and portfolio optimisation, though commercial-scale quantum computing remains early stage.
DexMat produces Galvorn, a carbon-negative carbon nanotube material designed as a conductive alternative to copper and aluminium. A January 2026 study by S&P Global found that copper supply is projected to fall 10 million metric tons short of demand by 2040, constituting what it described as a “systemic risk for global industries, technological advancement, and economic growth,” driven by AI infrastructure, electrification, and defence demand. IAG said the investment provides a vantage point into how next-generation materials may reshape industrial and energy risk – areas with long-run relevance to its commercial insurance book.
Taken together, the five investments constitute a coherent thesis: that the next phase of Australian insurance will be defined by faster-paying climate products, a shift in motor liability from drivers to system operators, urgent technology infrastructure renewal, and emerging computational tools that could transform how risk is modelled and priced. By contrast, QBE Ventures has concentrated approximately a quarter of its portfolio on deep-tech start-ups with cyber capabilities, building an innovation ecosystem around its global cyber value proposition – a difference in emphasis that broadly reflects each insurer's current commercial priorities.
Gunther said the fund’s ultimate purpose is to translate external innovation into IAG capability. “Our role is to connect IAG with the best ideas globally and translate those insights into meaningful capability. These partnerships ensure we remain well positioned to navigate emerging risks, build resilience, and deliver long-term value for our customers,” he said.
