Analyze Re, a Halifax company whose software-as-a-service product helps reinsurers assess risk, has exited by selling out to Jersey City, N.J.-based data analytics company Verisk Analytics, Inc. for an undisclosed price.

People familiar with the deal said the price was in the $15 million to $20 million range. It meant that the investors in the company’s lone round of funding, in November 2012, doubled their money in a cash payout. Verisk is listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange and has a market value of US$13.7 billion. 

Announcing the deal today in a press release, Verisk said Analyze Re will become part of its AIR Worldwide business. Analyze Re analyzes risk, pricing and other factors for the reinsurance market, which is like insurance for insurers. It will now provide AIR Worldwide clients with additional real-time pricing, exposure management, and enterprise portfolio roll-up capabilities.

“Clients are increasingly looking to track and reduce portfolio risk in real-time,” said Bill Churney, president of AIR Worldwide. “Analyze Re’s advanced analytics will complement our existing software solutions, enabling companies to manage their enterprise view of risk and perform multi-modeling and portfolio optimization, all within a single environment.”

Analyze Re came together when Oliver Baltzer, Adrian Bentley and Shivam Rajdev decided to launch a company after the reinsurance support company they had been working at downsized. They decided there would be huge demand for a risk assessment product among medium-sized companies in the reinsurance market, which is forecast to grow to $2 trillion by 2025.

The company’s first funding round was a doozy by Atlantic Canadian standards at the time – a $1.4 million round led by Innovacorp and including BDC Capital, Rho Canada Ventures and a range of angel investors.

After the funding, Analyze Re hired five employees, moved into an office on Quinpool Road in Halifax. The market they were targeting was known to have a slow sales cycle, but people familiar with the company said it has been gaining clients in the past year.

“We’re excited to join the Verisk Analytics family of businesses,” said Bentley in the statement. “Our team has been creating technology solutions for the insurance, reinsurance, and capital markets industries for more than a decade, turning huge volumes of data into meaningful insights in seconds. We look forward to continuing to offer these capabilities as part of AIR’s already robust product offerings.”

The exit is good news for a host of groups in the region. The Analyze Re team first workshopped its idea at Dalhousie University’s Starting Lean program, and this is the first exit by a company that came together in the course led by professors Mary Kilfoil and Ed Leach.

The team then went through the second cohort of Launch36 (now the Propel ICT accelerator), and again this should be considered the first bona fide exit by a Launch36 alum. It was one of the first tenants at the Volta startup house in Halifax, and is now the organization's second exit (The first was Compilr).

For Innovacorp, which invested $600,000 in Analyze Re, this is the first real exit for one of its portfolio companies since GoInstant sold out to Salesforce.com in 2012.

BDC Capital, which invested in home-run-companies New Brunswick companies Radian6 and Q1 Labs, has continued its run of finding Atlantic Canadian companies that exit promptly. And for Jeff Grammer of Rho Ventures, this exit offers some validation of his strategy of investing in Atlantic Canada. Rho has offices in Montreal, Boston and Silicon Valley, but he has targeted several companies in Atlantic Canada.