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Hello, happy Friday.

Is it just me or does it feel like we’re entering a new chapter of innovation?

Ten years back it was very much innovate or die.
Startups will steal your lunch.

Then we moved into collaboration and venture clienting.
Investment continued.

And what, for the past couple of years at least, it’s all been about strategic acceleration.
A few CVCs closing down. Very little horizon 3 activity. 

And today, a real blend.

Let’s get today’s business moving.
Let’s build for tomorrow.
Let’s properly invest in creating new futures.

I’m loving it. It feels alive and exciting.

Right, let’s jump into the news.

AI leaves the pilot phase

Four carriers.
Four different signals.
Kinda.

Brown & Brown has declared AI a  ‘foundational enterprise capability’. Not, I repeat, not a side project. Anthropic, McKinsey and Accenture are all in the room. Claude Code is  being rolled out across the entire engineering org, and Claude to 23,000 teammates.

AXA is doing the workplace version.

Unsurprisingly for these guys, Microsoft 365 Copilot, rolled out globally, dropped straight into Teams, Outlook and Word. It’s the natural next step after Secure GPT, which AXA built in-house three years ago.

Guardian is playing the long game.

A seven-year AI modernisation agreement with HCLTech, covering data, applications and engineering, on top of an existing relationship.

And, finally, W.R. Berkley has put a number on it.

CEO Rob Berkley told analysts this week that underwriting workbenches are already delivering 20%+ efficiency gains, with “significant additional juice to squeeze.”

He’s not building his own model. Just using what’s out there and layering Berkley’s own judgement on top across its 60-odd businesses.

And this lends itself to a nice segway to hyperexponential.

hx launched hyperoperator this month, its agentic underwriting agent that takes a broker submission from inbox to fully priced and quoted risk. Live on stage at hx Live London, a submission went from email to triaged and priced risk in under three minutes. Nice.

Insuring the AI economy

There’s been a lot of chat about how the AI buildout also needs insuring.

Just not all in the same way.

Aon has taken its Data Center Lifecycle Insurance Program to $5bn, up from $3.5bn. Construction, delay in start-up, property damage, cyber, project cargo, the lot.

Klaimee is solving the other half of the same problem.

A $5.5m seed round (Y Combinator among the backers), built around who pays when an AI agent acts on its own and gets it wrong. Klaimee certifies the agent, then insures what’s left.

From reinsurance to reinvention

Speaking of how AI is changing the landscape, our very own Matt Ferguson recently sat down with Tom Graham – Head of Innovation & Partnerships at Chaucer, to get his take on this evolving market, and what this means for innovation.

The interview, part of our ongoing Beyond Boundaries series, covers how Chaucer approaches product creation, commercialisation and partnership building, as well as trends Tom is watching across AI, data, climate, supply chains, energy transition and market structure.

It’s a clear, honest and practical view – definitely one to watch.

Check out the interview here.

Distribution: everyone wants a piece

Three very different plays.

American Growth Insurance launched with close to $70m in committed equity from Rockbridge Growth Equity and Atomic, the venture studio behind Acorns and Hims.

It’s a super interesting model: buy independent agencies, then rebuild how they work using AI from the ground up.

They tested it on 10 agencies first. 50%+ profitability improvement, before a penny of institutional capital came in.

Mile Auto took a different route to a similar place.

The pay-per-mile MGA, built on computer-vision odometer readings instead of telematics hardware, acquired The Insurance House, a 62-year-old Southeast agency.

Combined premium now sits close to $100m, the point at which MGAs stop being interesting and start being investable.

And then there’s Steadfast.

KKR has joined a consortium bidding roughly A$7.7bn (about $5.3bn) for Australia’s largest broker network, with Amwins and Dragoneer alongside it.

Amwins takes the underwriting agency, KKR and Dragoneer take the retail brokerage.

Credit, not equity

Cover Genius has taken $100m from Vista Credit Partners, Vista Equity’s credit arm, at a $1.9bn valuation. Not a venture round but a credit facility, backed by 200+ platform partners including Klarna, Revolut and Booking.com processing $3bn+ in gross written sales.

And PremFina landed £400m in senior debt from Lloyds Banking Group, on top of an existing junior facility. Its loan book has grown 300% in 18 months.

Brazil and India play the growth game differently

Same ambition, three completely different routes in.

Sompo has signed to acquire Fator Seguradora outright, adding property, surety and financial lines strength and moving it from fifth to fourth in Brazil’s corporate insurance market.

Prudential Brazil went organic instead.

New product, Vida e Saúde 360º, extending cover to more than 20 neurodegenerative conditions with benefits starting at diagnosis, not after. Legado Protegido, a succession and wealth-transfer product, is coming next.

And a really interesting one from India.

Blackstone and former HDFC ERGO chief Anuj Tyagi have reportedly filed an R1 application with IRDAI for an entirely new general insurer.

90/10 ownership split, AI-native from day one across underwriting, claims, servicing and distribution.

And just to be clear, this is a filing, not an approved or operating insurer. Yet.

Prevention, at a very different price point

Neko Health, the Swedish preventive health scanner founded by Daniel Ek, closed a decent $700m Series C to fund its move into the US.

Whole-body scan, bloods, a clinician talking you through it, all in an hour. Love it. I’m going to be booking myself in very shortly.

There’s no insurance angle yet. It’s cash-pay, and there’s no sign that’s changing soon. Nige and I got into this on the pod this week, and where prevention like this eventually has to meet insurance.

Right, I’ve got to jump into a pile of meetings.

Before I do, a big thanks to all those out in Madrid who took time out to catch up last week. And huge congrats on the football/soccer! I think the whole of England, if not most of the world, loved being Spanish for the day!

For now, have a great weekend.

I’m running up a mountain tomorrow and hopefully finding some time to pin Nigel Walsh down for a recording of Unfiltered at some point once back.

Big love.

Matt

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