Introducing 9root, the Vertical AI Platform for Insurance
Transforming insurance industry workflows with agentic AI
As investor and boardroom appetite for vertical AI solutions explodes, we see few sectors better positioned for innovation than insurance. Legacy workflows – across customer support, regulatory filings, and claims– remain labor-intensive, highly manual, and costly to fulfill. Reliance on outdated processes and outsourcing relationships puts a drag on expense ratios while detracting from customer experience and revenue retention.
At Equal, we spent 2024 refining our thesis on how an AI-native platform could rapidly scale into a high-margin, defensible leader in insurance workflow automation. We started by examining the claims ecosystem, where tens of billions in annual spend is outsourced to third-party administrators (TPAs) that often operate with outdated systems and thin profit margins. Almost uniformly, feedback from experts we talked to (across carriers, MGAs, and BPOs) suggested a massive opportunity to develop and deploy process automation to lift both top and bottom-line performance for claims organizations. But as we dug deeper, we determined the opportunity for innovation extended well beyond claims workflows.
Discovery discussions with carrier leaders and prospective partners uncovered demand for customizable AI workflow solutions to drive efficiency across a much wider surface area: tasks like automating human-capital intensive regulatory filing processes; implementing faster customer-facing quoting; creating and managing documents; and augmenting compliance processes, among countless others. The opportunity was even bigger, and urgency from potential customers even greater, than we had anticipated.
Disjointed systems across vendors, untapped data that could inform underwriting, and lack of effective triage/prioritization each present persistent challenges and yet best-in-class agentic AI increasingly can address these types of tasks and workflows. For context, one major carrier we spoke with had a team of ~60 people for complying with state filings within a single policy line. Just within this single niche use case, there are likely tens of thousands of employees across the industry performing a task that could largely be handled more effectively by AI.
Carriers expressed strong demand for a provider that could customize their offering and make adoption easy. That said, stakeholders we spoke with also expressed that their organizations were already starting to feel vendor fatigue. They are wary of fragmented point solutions that might die off in coming years, and instead desire a scalable, enterprise-grade platform with the breadth, credibility, reliability, and longevity to support their needs into the future. In short, they wanted a partner, not just a product. In the absence of such a partner, enterprise spend on AI is flowing rapidly to large consulting firms (Accenture alone reported $3B in gen AI related bookings last year), and yet we believe firmly that a new entrant leveraging leading technology is better suited to deliver transformative business impact and alignment on outcomes compared to a legacy BPO. While achieving this level of intimacy and trust with customers is extremely difficult, we ultimately find this far more defensible and exciting than our initial focus, and we see burgeoning demand for this type of solution from customers and user archetypes across the insurance value chain.
By Q3 of last year, we were eager to find a team with the talent, network, and experience to take on this large opportunity. We were incredibly excited to be able to attract the team that is building 9root, the automation platform tackling complex and underserved insurance workflows with agentic AI. At the helm is Sean Chou, an extremely talented technologist and a repeat-founder, who previously scaled, led and exited Fieldglass (an ERP system for BPOs) to SAP and Catalytic (a RPA platform) to PagerDuty, and has significant experience selling to enterprise buyers in the insurance industry. Sean is joined by Sean Casey, who was most recently CTO/CPO at divvyDose, a pharmacy benefits management platform that was acquired by Optum, and was previously the co-founder and CTO of ShiftGig, a venture-funded labor marketplace business. The opportunity to work with this incredible duo comes from a decade-long relationship Rick has had with each of the founders, including being a seed investor in Catalytic. Together, Sean & Sean bring the ideal founder characteristics to this opportunity: truly differentiated experience scaling enterprise automation platforms; ties to insurance industry customers; very strong technical and product expertise; and a highly notable/respected track record. Above all else, they are great people - that matters a LOT in insurance.
Equal led 9root’s first financing earlier this year, as the company’s first and only institutional investor, and participated in the company’s subsequent seed round alongside our friends at Emergence Capital.
Insurance workflows are set to modernize rapidly over the coming years, and we couldn’t be more excited to partner with the company at the forefront of the industry’s evolution.
Congratulations to the team at 9root!