Founders

Having co-founded and built Snapsheet, one of the leading claims insuretech startups, CJ set his sights on the next phase of revolutionizing the claims space. At Snapsheet, the team made a choice to not build an end-to-end full stack claims TPA, a decision that in hindsight, CJ thought, prevented the company from fully reaching its potential by controlling the data and all aspects of the process. Martha joined CJ as Co-Founder and COO after spending the last 15+ years in startups and tech, including Rhino, Attune, and OnDeck. Reserv is a modern full stack TPA with technology underpinning all of its operations. Reserv leverages tech to drive efficiency and optimal claims outcomes and combines that with best-in-class customer service in an industry that is known for the opposite. Reserv is the first Altai Ventures incubated start-up.

Following Aon's acquisition of CoverWallet, where Rashmi was a co-founder, she experienced firsthand the extreme inefficiencies of the insurance back office. “Why are there more than twenty people copied on an email chain to reconcile $67.50?” she wondered. Typically, MGAs use a variety of systems, from policy admin to ePay to accounting, etc., and undertake a manual reconciliation process as all of these point solutions leave cracks in between them. Functional Finance looks to solve this pain point algorithmically by working with newly established MGAs that don't have this problem, as well as with existing MGAs that understand the pain point directly.

After building one of the most successful insuretech startups to date (SquareTrade sold to Allstate for $1.4B), Ahmed set his sights on another large pain point in the insurance industry – the substantiative cost of customer acquisition for personal auto insurance. Large carriers, such as State Farm and Geico, spend $15B on marketing and have physical brick-and-mortar stores to fuel customer acquisition. The team at AutoComplete believes that personal auto insurance should be purchased at point of sale with a seamless tech enabled experience when the consumer is making the decision to either buy or lease a car.

Following their respective careers at Google and Bridgewater Associates, Tom and Mike were in search of a complex problem that deep machine learning could tackle and decided on insurance claims workflow. In the evolution of insuretech to date, claims as an area has received the least attention and while other areas of insurance (distribution, underwriting, data, etc.) have matured, claims has continued to lag behind. EvolutionIQ's focus has been on disability and workers compensation claims, areas that represent large markets where the team aims to have data and machine learning models drive insight into a claims adjuster's everyday decision making.

Having started and successfully sold RiskMatch to Vertafore, Kabir decided to pursue the path of a repeat founder. Prior to RiskMatch as a broker at Marsh, Kabir witnessed the pain points insurance brokers faced with utilizing disparate data to provide effective solutions to clients. Many brokerages came together through acquisitions given the highly fragmented nature of the industry and, as a result, were stuck with numerous systems delivering poor and inconsistent data. In order to streamline insurance workflows and enable brokerages to effectively drive new and renewal business, Kabir set out to create a platform that could become the single source of truth for a brokerage's data and subsequently layer in meaningful analytics and insights.

Spike was first exposed to purchasing insurance during his time at Blackstone and Opendoor, an experience that shocked him given the inefficiency and stacks of unnecessary paperwork. After meeting Gordon, who grew up around the insurance dinner table, the pair wanted to explore building a business that would modernize the insurance purchasing journey. As one of their first research steps, they ended up spending time at the offices of a local insurance broker, observing the day-to-day requirements of the job and quickly realized that brokerages at the time resembled highly profitable Rube Goldberg machines. In a post-Zenefits world where early insurtech startups sought to go direct to consumer, Spike and Gordon believed that brokers were valuable experts who were very much needed by their clients, but who would benefit from better data and digital tools to better serve them.

Bobby's first foray into insurance began with his exploration of the E&S space, while working with Max Levchin's VC firm, SciFi Ventures. This experience led Bobby to launch Pathpoint Insurance, a tech first wholesale insurance broker. After scaling Pathpoint, Bobby decided that his true passion was being a zero to one founder and he set out to launch another startup in insurance, an industry he became deeply passionate about. Bobby believed that customer centricity lacked in the SMB insurance market and thus launched Rainbow Insurance to build verticalized solutions for SMBs one segment at a time, but with technology and risk management underpinning all verticals.

There are some 27 million firms in the U.S. and nearly all are privately held. The vast majority have fewer than 500 employees, but account for 48% of American jobs and 43.5% of GDP. Despite accounting for nearly 50% of the US economy, private companies are challenging to find, let alone ascertain the most basic information about what they do. This lack of information has made it difficult for companies looking to engage this massive, but elusive market. Andrew and Nevin (classmates at Harvard) decided to build a search and intelligence engine for finding and analyzing private companies. “Whether you're looking to acquire, invest, underwrite, partner with these businesses, we want to be your front door to private companies, at the end of the day.”

Michael had spent a number of years launching a variety of products at CoverWallet and following its acquisition by Aon, decided to pursue his own venture. He personally experienced the painful process of purchasing life insurance and at that time paired up with Thrive Capital, a fund that incubated Oscar Health, to incubate another tech first insurance incumbent, but this time in life insurance and on the distribution side, which Michael knew from his time at CoverWallet. Michael partnered up with Jack as his CTO and Co-founder, whom he had known for many years and who was previously co- founder and CTO of Petal, another successful fintech startup.

Having launched Insurent as founding COO, the first player in residential lease guaranty, Rory developed a passion for the different facets underpinning this business – the ability to help students, the low loss ratios (some of the best in the insurance industry), and the flexibility to digitally embed such a financial product. It took him fifteen years and a few different journeys with successful fintech startups to come back to the space in an effort to buy Insurent. Not being able to agree on price, Rory decided to start his own business instead and thus launched Leap in 2018.

As a fintech investor at Aquiline Capital Partners, Cole explored many insuretech business models and developed a passion for the industry. His calling was to become an entrepreneur, but he hadn't settled on an idea. He began to call colleagues across PE, the likes of Thoma Bravo and Serent Capital, to understand how they were thinking about embedding insurance products into their roll-up-oriented portfolio companies. Out of many possible approaches, most wanted to find a way to retain profitable risk through captives, but the process of a captive setup was too cumbersome for non-insurance people to figure out and was generally not a priority to pursue. Simplifying this process through technology is what Cole set out to do with Authentic, and he brought on Kyle, who has deep actuarial experience, as his co-founder.

Cousins Aaron and Chris are surety through and through. Aaron got his foothold into the surety market through the agency side of the industry, while Chris came up through underwriting commercial surety at Chubb. Both would meet for coffee multiple times a week to brainstorm pain points and ideas for starting a business in the space, as both knew they wanted to be entrepreneurs in the long term. Having seen the power of modern low code technology applied to personal auto and life insurance, both Chris and Aaron believed that the same applications held true for small ticket surety transactions at the agency level. This became the core initial wedge for the Propeller offering.