Video game inspiration lets Neptune Flood build a window into its technology system

Neptune Flood, a St. Petersburg insure-tech company, provides about 3,000 to 4,000 quotes for homeowners flood insurance every day, drawing on advanced computing power to evaluate and price policies.

The company now is taking customers behind the scenes, creating a visualizer that shows how its patent-pending technology, dubbed Triton, works in real time.

See the visualizer here.

“Triton is a reactive artificial intelligence machine that has the early stages of limited memory artificial intelligence,” said Trevor Burgess, Neptune Flood’s CEO. “It’s hard to visualize and understand artificial intelligence, so we built this window into our system to help explain how it works.”

Neptune Flood is among a growing number of companies that write private flood insurance policies which, until a few years ago, could only be purchased from the National Flood Insurance Program. Neptune uses big data sets, both proprietary data and data it has purchased, and combines that with advanced computing power to quickly determine if it will offer a policy to an applicant and how much that policy will costs.

Related story: Big changes ahead for St. Pete insure-tech Neptune Flood

Neptune offers coverage in 39 states including its most recent addition, Louisiana.

Burgess created the visualizer after seeing social media counters developed by Smiirl, a French company that produces and commercializes counters for businesses. “After seeing a Facebook-like counter at his local poké joint, he got the 1980’s video game inspired idea to create a live visualization of Triton at work,” a posting on the visualizer webpage says.

The visualizer is a map of the United States. Each dot on the live map represents a real-time policy being quoted, Burgess said, bringing transparency to Neptune’s system.

The yes or no decision on offering a policy is represented by green or red blasts. The price is represented by the size of each blast. The data is live and updated daily.

A screenshot of the Triton visualizer from Neptune Flood