A year ago, Shivam Rajdev sat in a Halifax restaurant and explained that he and a few colleagues wanted something more exciting in life than their jobs at a reinsurance back-office consultancy.

In the year since, he and some friends have followed a winding path to arrive at their own young company that plays on their experience in the reinsurance business. They have formed Analyze Re, a highly acclaimed company whose software-as-a-service product helps reinsurers assess risk.

Reinsurers insure all or part of a normal insurer’s portfolio of policies, helping them to diversify risk. Reinsurers need analytic systems to assess all the risk within those portfolios. Analyze Re offers such systems over the cloud, providing a much-needed service for firms not large enough to develop them themselves.

 “We’re helping reinsurers to understand where their risk issues are and also to improve their profitability,” said Adrian Bentley, one of the co-founders. “We do it by offering high-end analytics through the cloud.”

The startup has been drawing accolades from a range of support agencies in the region. The team went through the Starting Lean course at Dalhousie University in Halifax, and then was accepted to PropelICT’s Launch36 accelerator. It has also been coached in the NextPhase program.

But the team did not immediately focus on this business and tried other projects before deciding that the world’s 2,500 reinsurance firms constituted the market it knew best. Even when they started a product for reinsurance, they thought the most lucrative clients may be in emerging markets. During their client discovery — the lean startup practice of canvassing customers for feedback before proceeding with a project — they discovered that emerging market clients were not the ideal initial adopters of the service.

In fairly short order, the team settled on targeting the new reinsurance firms being created each year. Until recently, there were about five reinsurers created each year. However, that number has accelerated somewhat in recent years as hedge funds, dissatisfied with the returns in traditional investments, began to open reinsurance units.

Analyze Re can help these young enterprises because its cloud-based service lets reinsurers establish themselves without buying servers or taking on technical personnel.

 “Hedge funds want to be as lean as possible,” said Rajdev.

The company is now looking for about $750,000 in seed financing and hopes to pitch to funds or individuals who specialize in financial services to tap their expertise, networks and bank books.

The team is talking to potential clients about its product and is investigating a future version that can be used on mobile phones and devices. Reinsurers want more flexibility in assessing risk in the pre-underwriting process, said Rajdev, and that is what a mobile version should allow.