US-based property and casualty (P&C) insurance provider Guidewire intends to grow its India development centre to become the second largest in four years, said Diego Devalle, the chief product development officer, of Guidewire Software. The company will also build a professional services team in India and grow it to around 150 by the end of 2025.

“We want to grow this development centre to be the second largest, three or four years from now, and we want to go beyond 500 employees to 800. The vision is that a big portion of what we develop at Guidewire will be executed here. There is a gigantic amount of talent here. Out of our overall budget, from PBO, we will invest substantially in India. And so that will be a big portion of what we do here,” Devalle shared.

In India, Guidewire has around 400 employees, which plans to grow to 650 in the next two years. In 2017, the company entered India by acquiring the Chennai-based Cyence. However, it set up its Bangalore Development Center in 2021.

Guidewire employs over 350 engineering professionals across its campuses in Bangalore and Chennai. The team focuses on building Cloud Services and Data Platform products for the Guidewire Platform.

Besides its headquarters in San Mateo, California, Guidewire has six other centres in the US. Its international centres include India, Poland, Ireland, and Canada.

Professional services

Guidewire established professional services in the US early on and did not have a significant presence in Asia-Pacific besides a small presence in Malaysia. It will now build professional services in India, too.

“We want professional services to be close to engineering. Since we innovate in India, it is important to have professional services close to where we innovate. The logic is our development center is also attached to a professional service capable of delivering innovations to the customer.”

The company’s decision to come to India was a combination of talent and building a team mirroring its team in San Mateo, he said. As of July, its global employee strength was 3,469, of which 1,692 employees were in the United States and 1,777 employees internationally.

From an innovation perspective, what Guidewire develops in India is done only here, the CPDO stated. “It’s not like we have a team here contributing to something also done in another part. A portion of innovation comes from the lab here. The intention is to invest and innovate in India, not invest for the sake of investing.”

Devalle explained that India’s insurance industry is yet to be modernized. Once it started investing in its India development center, Guidewire also saw the possibility of selling its products here.

“India insurance industry players use a lot of custom-developed software, and we can drive greater efficiency with our Guidewire Cloud Platform. Overall, we see the agility and flexibility our cloud platform and solutions deliver resonate with the industry’s growing demand for faster AI-powered innovation. India is becoming interesting to us, so we are at a point where we must be present here to serve India well. We want to build, innovate and sell in India, and close the entire loop. This is the ambition,” he said.

Strong potential market

India could quickly become a strong potential market, he noted, adding that Guidewire is investigating the opportunity to establish itself as a vendor in the country. Traditionally, the company was present in Japan, New Zealand, Australia, and other markets in Asia-Pacific.

“We have been able to attract top talent to Guidewire India to work on the core technologies powering the Guidewire Cloud platform, which combines digital, core, analytics, and machine learning and is delivered as a cloud service. We have also established a strong academia program, to attract fresh talent from six well-known engineering institutions,” said Mohammed Anzy, VP of Engineering and Managing Director of Guidewire India.

As of July 31, 2024, Guidewire’s Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) was $864 million.