What we do matters
Socotra provides global insurers with a modern, enterprise-grade core system that enables them to accelerate product development, reduce maintenance costs, and improve customer experiences.
A modern platform for technology-driven insurers
Founded in 2014 and based in San Francisco, Socotra is the first cloud-native core platform for insurance and the first core system to believe its APIs and configuration formats should be open to the world.
Mission-driven
The industry has seen Socotra, and it wants more! Our ongoing mission is to meet this demand and liberate a critical industry from the rigid, fragile, over-customized technologies of the past.
Our investors
Socotra is backed by top-tiered venture-capital firms.
Our leadership team
Socotra’s team has deep experience delivering complex platforms at some of the world’s most renowned software companies.
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Dan Woods CEO and Founder
Dan Woods is the founder and CEO of Socotra, the first modern, cloud-based platform for technology-driven insurers. Dan previously managed partnerships at Palantir and IT investing at Formation 8. He holds a MS in Computer Science from Stanford.
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Ekine Akuiyibo VP of Business Development and Deployments
Ekine Akuiyibo is the Vice President of Business Development and Deployments at Socotra, where he oversees field engineering, product delivery, partnerships, training, and support. Prior to Socotra, Ekine spent 15 years in enterprise software development, sales, and services at Sun Microsystems, BAE Systems, and Oracle. Most recently, Ekine worked on large scale ML problems at Oracle. He holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford.
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Heidi Friedrikson Director of Operations
Heidi Friedrikson is the Director of Operations at Socotra, where she oversees finance, human resources, operations, and recruiting. Before Socotra, Heidi worked on operations at Addepar, SkyFire, and Cisco Systems.
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Matt Hamilton Director of Product
Matt Hamilton is Socotra’s Director of Product and is responsible for conceptualizing, designing, and implementing the next wave of product capabilities for Socotra. Matt comes to Socotra from Guidewire in product management. He has a BA in computer science from UCSD and an MBA from Stanford.
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Ken Holmes VP of Sales
Ken Holmes is Socotra's Vice President of Sales. Ken is responsible for new customer acquisition as well as existing customer growth and renewal. Prior to Socotra, Ken led all North American sales at Tubular Labs, the leader in social video measurement, and prior to that led international sales at NetBase, the leading social listening solution. He holds a B.A. from the University of San Francisco.
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Harsh Shah Head of Marketing
Harsh Shah is Socotra’s Head of Marketing responsible for overseeing marketing strategy, positioning, customer acquisition, and growth efforts. Before Socotra, Harsh worked on mobile products at Google and AdMob. He holds a B.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles.
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Richard Vistnes VP of Engineering
Richard Vistnes is Socotra’s Vice President of Engineering, where he leads a large team of engineers and developers who are building the company’s technology solutions and next-generation products. Prior to Socotra, Richard held senior engineering leadership roles at Salesforce and Sentient Technologies. Richard holds a Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford.
Socotra had a better sense than most vendors about the levers of our business. They’ve added value well beyond their contracted role of technology vendor.
Marcus Oberholzer, Head of Growth, Strategy, & Finance, Nationwide Spire
The technical capabilities offered in the Socotra platform are designed to support a quality user experience. Socotra’s cloud-native architecture and pluggable/extensible design makes it a good fit as a solution in our enterprise business platform.
Jerry Sayre, Chief Software Engineering Officer, Mutual of Omaha
Socotra creates a foundation to improve our service and, in turn, our customer and broker experiences, and it will also help improve our agility in reacting to changing market trends.
Ted Aerts, COO, MS Amlin Insurance S.E.
Symetra wanted the ability to rapidly develop and deploy new products in an agile fashion as consumers shift their purchasing habits to digital channels. Socotra’s platform allows us to adapt our processes and deliver the best experience to our customers.
Mindi Work, SVP and Chief of Strategy, Symetra
Socotra handed us the essential underlying insurance functionality as a readily developed product on a silver platter.
Alexander Sanders, CTO, TONI Digital
With Socotra, we were able to develop Poncho Insurance, a unique customer proposition for comprehensive car insurance in the Australian market, in a short timeframe. The platform is super flexible and low-cost allowing us to continually improve the product and deliver it at a great price to customers.
Phil Wilson-Brown, Executive Manager, IAG Satellite
As Symetra continues to build and offer digital-first products, Socotra’s cloud-native platform, powerful data model, and intuitive design will be leveraged to facilitate a smooth transition from existing architecture and provide a strong foundation for Symetra’s future.
Mindi Work, SVP and Chief of Strategy, Symetra
As a technical partner, Socotra helped Nationwide realize its vision by being the core system upon which Spire runs its entire policy admin operation, from quote to claim, creating an ideal insurance product together for the modern-day preferences of consumers.
Scott Liles, Lead Business Executive, Spire
Integrating the Socotra insurance core using their well-documented APIs was easy. Additionally, we can configure everything ourselves—no phone calls or time-consuming and costly customizations needed.
Alexander Sanders, CTO, TONI Digital
[Scotra’s] core technology is more advanced than other options we evaluated in the marketplace for our digital-focused initiative.