Insurance x AI | The First Wave of Gen AI in P&C

Co-Authored with Christo Ritter & Adam Chadroff. Initially appeared on the Equal Ventures Blog.

The $800 Billion U.S. property & casualty (P&C) insurance industry is one of the economy’s most essential sectors. Yet, despite its importance, the technology supporting the sector remains vastly outdated.

With decades-old infrastructure, and some systems dating back 50+ years, the industry’s technology stack is fragmented, manual, and full of structured and unstructured data. Large Language Models are particularly adept at parsing and working with these forms of data, and with recent breakthroughs in model accuracy and reliability, we believe AI is now ready to support (and even own) high-stakes workflows across insurance.

Unlike past waves of innovation in Insurtech, which largely focused on digitizing legacy processes, today’s AI-native startups are rethinking insurance from the ground up across the value chain – from pricing and risk to claims and customer service.

As a firm, Equal has been investing in Insurtech since our inception. We believe we’re in the early innings of a step function change in how the industry operates, and we’re excited to partner with the founders and companies driving this change.

Mapping the Market: The First Wave of AI-Driven Companies

To understand where innovation is happening, we’ve mapped the current landscape of startups founded post-2021 – a new generation of companies built AI-first, not retrofitted. While incumbents are beginning to adopt AI as well, this map focuses on companies designed from day one for this new world.

As we survey the market, we’re starting to see innovation across every segment of the insurance value chain. Looking at this emerging class of players, we’ve found it helpful to bifurcate the market into two broad categories: AI Enablers and AI-Native Operators.