Sophia Pilkington-Miksa: Inside ManyPets’ shift from external technology to in-house innovation

Back in 2017, when insurtech ManyPets was racing to market on a third-party platform, data maturity and innovation was low on its priority list.

Since then, however, the firm has invested heavily in migrating its customer base to an in-house platform and maturing its own data and analysis capabilities.

This – according to chief product officer Sophia Pilkington-Miksa – laid the foundations that enabled the business to move from simply operating a digital insurance product to actively using data as a driver of product development, pricing strategy and customer experience.

Pilkington-Miksa sat down with Insurance Times to discuss how ManyPets’ technology stack has evolved over the years, why bringing data capabilities in-house has been critical to the company’s growth and how the firm is looking to maintain its innovative edge into the future.

ManyPets’ modern architecture was not built from the ground up. So how did it get to where it is today?

“In 2017 when we first launched into pet insurance, we used a third-party platform. That was a tactical decision for speed. So just like the incumbents in the market, we’ve also had [data and analytics] challenges,” Pilkington-Miksa explains.

“We chose to invest in our own platform over many years and many different markets and we then invested in a migration project to move over 300,000 policies from the third-party insurance platform that we were on to our own technology.

“That was a real, meaningful investment in something that in the here-and-now was providing no return. It was a strategic investment.”

In-house capabilities

With its platforming now brought in-house, ManyPets turned its attention to building its data maturity – creating a “platform advantage, as well as a data advantage” was the key to developing the firm’s competitive edge.

Pilkington-Miksa believes that the firm out-invested its competitors in the extraction of structured data, which, in combination with data enrichment via third party services, provided a springboard for process innovation.

“We’ve been in the market since 2017 – we have lifetime pattern data over 10 years and a million risks,” she adds.

“We’ve invested in optical character recognition technology to extract structured data into our data warehouse. All of our data flows into it in real-time. We use artificial intelligence (AI) for automated data quality checks.

“We have quite sophisticated machine learning operations capabilities in terms of how we train our models – for example [cloud-based data and AI platform] Domo, which enables us to have multiple models running in parallel.”

The firm has also utilised third-party AI models for more generic tasks, such as extracting customer intent from emails using Open AI’s ChatGPT model.

Such models are available to competitors too, but Pilkington-Miksa says that is where the investment in a closed-loop of platform and data expertise begins to pay for itself.

The in-house ability to integrate OpenAI’s model into its proprietary, API-drive platform meant ManyPets was able to move its email triage processes from trial to meaningful business adoption within six weeks, far quicker than requesting the change within a third-party platform.

Stability through innovation

The adoption of new technologies can naturally lead to teething troubles. Indeed, research from technology provider RDT released in May 2025 found that while 70% of insurance firms viewed automating business processes as essential for staying competitive, rapid implementation raised the risk of losing alignment between operational teams and leadership vision.

Pilkington-Miksa, however, takes a very optimistic view on balancing innovation and stability.

She explains: “In terms of the innovation [and] stability balance, it’s a bit of an art and a science. The science provides the stability and the art is really understanding our customer segments well.

“We can try out new ideas at a low cost using AI prototyping tools. It’s never been easier to get ideas at low cost in front of customers and get feedback quickly. We also do things like hack weeks that allow people freedom to be bold and think through big, brave ideas.

“The stability part comes from a combination of strategic clarity, data and how we work. We always make sure we’ve got that ahead-of-the-bonnet, longer-term view of where we’re going and what matters to us.”

Looking ahead, ManyPets plans to continue developing its technological capabilities to move forward with its extensive growth plans.

She concludes: “We are very optimistic about AI. We view it as a huge opportunity to enhance the potential of our humans and what they’re spending their time on.

“We have a huge growth agenda, so for us, we’re ensuring our teams are adopting AI effectively and with impact, to help them achieve more. There’s a balance between growth and profitability, but we want both.

“One of the ways we achieve both, and have our cake and eat it too, is making sure our technology is as simple and fast to change as possible and also that our humans are as efficient and enabled as possible.”