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