Piko Labs AI, Inc. (Piko) appoints Aditi Javeri Gokhale, former chief strategy officer at Northwestern Mutual, as strategic advisor. The San Francisco-based, venture-backed technology firm, which builds AI and unified-ledger tools for the captive insurance industry, says Gokhale's appointment is effective this month. In her new role, Gokhale focuses on strategy and operational growth as Piko scales its platform for the captive insurance industry. The firm says she brings Fortune 100 scaling, capital, and institutional-investment experience to the captive insurance technology sector. She joins a leadership team anchored by founder and chief executive officer Christina Card Zbar, and vice chairman and chief commercial officer Steve McElhiney, past board chair of the Captive Insurance Companies Association (CICA) and the Vermont Captive Insurance Association (VCIA), who joined Piko earlier this year. Gokhale spent nearly a decade in senior leadership at Northwestern Mutual, most recently as chief strategy officer, president of retail investments, and head of institutional investments. In those roles, she oversaw teams managing more than US$630 billion in company and client assets. Under her leadership, the firm's wealth management business posted record growth. She also led Northwestern Mutual Future Ventures, the company's US$200 million venture investing arm focused on FinTech, WealthTech, and AI. Earlier in her career, Gokhale held senior roles at American Express, Travelocity, and Nutrisystem, and began her career at Booz Allen Hamilton. She holds a BS and an MBA from MIT. Commenting on the appointment, Card Zbar says: "We built Piko because captive owners and managers have been running real institutional complexity on tooling that wasn't built for them. Aditi has spent her career bringing institutional rigour to exactly that kind of complexity, at the scale our customers operate at." She adds that Gokhale and McElhiney bring a combination of "institutional scale and captive-industry depth that meaningfully extends" the team being built at Piko. Gokhale says: "Captive insurance is one of the most sophisticated risk structures in financial services, and it deserves technology that matches that sophistication. I am focused on helping Piko deliver on that promise: for captive owners, managers, reinsurers, and the broader ecosystem." Piko is a seed-stage company focused on solving unstructured data challenges and streamlining operations for the captive ecosystem.
