ZestyAI, an AI-powered risk decision platform, has announced the appointment of David Friend as chief financial officer and John Ross as senior vice president of client development.
Both executives join the company as it reports a series of commercial milestones, including turning cash flow positive, more than doubling product usage, surpassing 200 regulatory approvals, and adding 26 new carrier customers.
Friend arrives with over two decades of experience in scaling enterprise software businesses. He most recently spent five years as CFO at Quantum Metric, guiding the company past the $100m annual recurring revenue mark. Prior to that, he worked as an investor at Bain Capital Ventures, where he supported founders building enterprise software companies. In his new role, he will oversee finance, accounting, and corporate development.
Ross brings nearly 20 years of P&C insurance experience spanning carriers, InsurTech, and data and analytics providers. He joins from LexisNexis Risk Solutions, where he oversaw the auto and home portfolio and managed the firm’s largest commercial relationships across personal lines insurers. At ZestyAI, he will head client development with a focus on helping customers achieve measurable outcomes through precision underwriting, rate segmentation, and reinsurance capital access.
Among the milestones ZestyAI recorded in the past year, the company added notable new clients including Applied Underwriters, California Casualty, Lemonade, and Marsh, while deepening existing enterprise relationships with Berkshire Hathaway, the California FAIR Plan, and CSAA.
The company also launched ZORRO, its agentic AI platform, alongside ZORRO Discover™, which it claims can cut manual regulatory and market research time for underwriters and product leaders by 95%.
ZestyAI operates as a risk decision intelligence platform serving P&C carriers, reinsurers, brokers, and regulators across the United States. Its platform combines property-level data, predictive AI models, and agentic AI automation to support underwriting, rating, reinsurance, and regulatory workflows.
The company’s models cover perils including wildfire, severe convective storm, and non-weather water, and are validated using climate science and historical loss data.
ZestyAI founder and CEO Attila Toth said, “David and John are exactly the leaders we need at this stage.
“David has built and scaled the financial foundation of high-growth enterprise software companies, and John has spent his career inside the P&C insurance market helping carriers turn data into better underwriting and portfolio decisions. They strengthen how we operate as a company and how we partner with customers as AI becomes core decision infrastructure across the insurance enterprise.”
Ross said, “What drew me to ZestyAI is a rare combination: a company with the technology to genuinely change this market for the better, and the opportunity to do it in partnership with carriers, reinsurers, and ultimately the consumers they serve.”
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