Into the Unknown

IT’S NOT SURPRISING that insurance startups employ actuaries. What’s more unusual: for them to deploy their scenario-crunching risk experts on what’s effectively a business-development exercise. Earlier this year, that’s what happened at Clover Health, when its co-founders Vivek Garipalli and Kris Gale wanted to figure out the near impossible: Which new markets were the least risky for the San Francisco–based insurer to enter?

Clover’s chief actuary, Judah Rabinowitz, and his team typically model data like mortality rates or the likelihood of sickness. Now they were applying hypothetical future analysis to macroeconomics. In October, after raising $120 million, Clover unveiled its expansion plans—to San Antonio and Savannah,