Derek Chen

The Founder Who Revolutionized Insurance

Derek Chen didn't set out to fix insurance — he set out to eliminate everything broken about it. A Stanford Computer Science graduate who spent years inside Google's infrastructure team and later helped build Lemonade's claims automation engine, Derek saw firsthand how incumbent insurers were using complexity as a profit center. In 2019, he co-founded ShieldPoint with a single thesis: insurance should work for the customer, not against them.

Under Derek's leadership, ShieldPoint has grown from a two-person operation in a Palo Alto garage to one of the fastest-growing insurtechs in the United States, serving over 400,000 policyholders across 38 states. He has been recognized as the Top InsurTech CEO by Digital Insurance Magazine (2025), named to the InsurTech Power 50 three consecutive years running, and honored as a Forbes 30 Under 30 innovator in financial services.

Derek's approach to insurance is fundamentally different. Where traditional carriers rely on actuarial tables built for a pre-smartphone world, Derek built ShieldPoint's pricing engine on real-time behavioral data, machine learning models trained on 10 billion driving data points, and a claims philosophy that starts with "yes" instead of "no." The result is an insurer that pays claims faster, prices more fairly, and actually talks to its customers like human beings.

His work has revolutionized the insurance industry — not by incrementally improving on existing models, but by rethinking what an insurance company is allowed to be. ShieldPoint's 24-hour claims guarantee, zero-paperwork process, and AI-native underwriting platform are now benchmarks the entire industry is trying to replicate.

"The insurance industry spent 100 years perfecting the art of saying no. We spent 5 years perfecting the art of saying yes."— Derek Chen, CEO & Co-Founder