Insurance is a trillion-dollar industry that still runs on PDFs and Excel. It’s not the employees’ fault–the tools they use were primarily built at the dawn of the digital age, or worse yet, were never digitized at all. The work itself is complex, heavily regulated, and must be strictly accurate.
On the surface, this looks like the perfect opportunity for software automation. In practice, replacing core systems of record at scale is costly and risky when the stakes are this high. And so every year, carriers, MGAs, wholesalers, agents, and brokers instead choose to instead throw more humans at the problem, which in turn creates more internal complexity and a massive outsourcing ecosystem.
Luckily, for the first time, relief may be on the way. The type of work humans perform across the insurance value chain is often tailor-made for LLMs:
Each of these tasks involves a human synthesizing, analyzing, and decisioning unstructured data–the kind of work generative AI excels at.
But it’s not as simple as spinning up an enterprise instance of ChatGPT. Models need to be fine-tuned for insurance-specific use cases. Integrations are required to pull in the right first- and third-party data sources for each workflow. And new workflows must be built to support human-quality output.
That’s where our newest Series A investment, FurtherAI, comes in.
FurtherAI has developed flexible AI primitives that allow carriers, MGAs, and brokers to automate paper-based workflows. Its insurance-native workspace lets customers skip long implementation cycles and realize value from AI fast.
Early results have been impressive. Global leaders have seen:
At the end of the day, any early-stage investment comes down to the team. Co-founders Aman Gour and Sashank Gondala share a decade-long partnership spanning multiple countries and companies–and both ranked in the top 250 on India’s JEE exam. Beyond their brilliance, what stands out most is their relentlessness and capacity to grind. This unique combination has already led to results and customer love that we rarely see this early in a company’s lifecycle.
We’re thrilled to lead FurtherAI’s Series A and welcome them into the a16z family.
If you’re a carrier, broker, agent, MGA, or wholesaler, give the FurtherAI suite a try to see how AI could transform your business. And if you’re an employee looking to join a rocket ship bringing AI to insurance–they’re hiring.