ITC Europe Challenge Lab Reveals Three Finalists to Tackle AI Liability, Powered by Generali

ITC Europe has named Exona Lab, Protostars, and Jsonify as the three finalists for its Challenge Lab, an initiative designed to solve the insurance industry’s most complex hurdles. For fintech professionals, this selection highlights the urgent shift toward managing AI liability as insurers seek systematic ways to quantify and govern exposure across the value chain.

What was announced

The Challenge Lab, delivered in partnership with Generali, specifically targeted the theme “AI Liability: Insuring Intelligence at Scale.” The initiative invited startups and scaleups to develop solutions that give insurers a more systematic way to identify, monitor, and govern AI-related exposure as adoption accelerates. Following a selection process by a joint panel from ITC and Generali, three finalists were chosen based on their innovation, real-world deployability, and relevance to the fast-moving AI risk landscape. These companies will present their solutions at ITC Europe 2026 in Barcelona, held at La Llotja de Mar on 28–29 May 2026.

The finalists represent different approaches to the AI liability challenge:

• Exona Lab: This company builds an AI Risk Engine designed for insurers, reinsurers, and brokers. The platform identifies and quantifies AI-driven liability across portfolios by mapping AI usage into a consistent risk framework and linking exposure to specific liability pathways.
• Protostars: An AI-native cyber risk intelligence platform that converts fragmented technical and compliance data into decision-ready intelligence. It focuses on compliance automation and CE Mark readiness, providing a live view of control maturity for insurers, brokers, and MGAs.
• Jsonify: This firm transforms public web data into intelligence by benchmarking competitor AI exclusion wordings and monitoring EU AI Act guidance in real time. Jsonify already processes over 10 million rows monthly with 98.7% accuracy and is in production with multiple large enterprises.

The winner will be announced live on stage on 28 May. The successful startup will receive industry recognition, PR coverage, and a speaking slot at ITC Europe 2027.

The companies involved

Assicurazioni Generali SpA, the primary partner for the Challenge Lab, is a global insurance provider that has increasingly focused on operationalizing innovation through its Group Head of Innovation office. The company’s involvement in the Challenge Lab underscores a strategic interest in finding technical solutions to the "hard parts" of AI liability, particularly as global regulatory frameworks begin to influence underwriting requirements. By collaborating with early-stage technology providers, Generali positions itself to better understand the infrastructure needed to manage AI-related exposure.

ITC Europe, which also operates ITC London, is a major platform for the insurance technology sector, connecting pioneering startups with established industry leaders. The 2026 event in Barcelona is expected to draw more than 650 senior insurance and insurtech executives. The organization focuses on creating interactive environments where technical solutions can be vetted for scalability and real-world application. Its events serve as a bridge between the technical capabilities of scaleups and the risk management needs of large-scale incumbents, particularly in emerging areas like AI and cyber risk.

What this means

The selection of these finalists signals that the insurance industry is moving beyond theoretical discussions of AI and into the practicalities of risk quantification. The focus on "live views" and "compliance automation" suggests that traditional, static underwriting models are no longer sufficient for the AI era. This puts significant pressure on legacy insurers who have yet to integrate real-time data feeds into their risk assessments. The central question for the sector is no longer whether AI will be adopted, but how quickly the industry can build the guardrails to insure it without facing catastrophic, unmodeled losses.