InsurTechTalk

Steve Johnson, Founder and Chief Product Officer of insured.io and author of The Insurance UX Survival Guide, joins InsurTechTalk to talk about why claims is where customer experience is won or lost. Steve started as a policy processor, became an underwriter, and fell into technology at a Northern California MGA. Twenty-plus years later he is still trying to close the gap between what policyholder...

Every brokerage has a placement strategy. Then there is the placement reality: where producers actually end up placing business. Duncan Crystal, Co-Founder of Herald, spends his days closing that gap. In Episode 173 of InsurTechTalk, Duncan explains why Herald started with a unified API for commercial insurance, why forcing all of insurance into one API hit a ceiling, and how AI let the company mo...

Yehuda Daniel Katz got into insurance to fight back against a denied claim that devastated his family. By the time he could act, the statute of limitations had expired. So he studied insurance instead, worked his way through Willis, an MGA, and an insurance fraud investigation, and eventually built the company he needed all along. In Episode 172 of InsurTechTalk, Yehuda Daniel, Founder of RiskReme...

In February of 2026, the market wiped nearly $300 billion off software valuations in two days, convinced that LLMs would make traditional SaaS redundant. Nine months later, Michael Nadel, Global Insurance Practice Lead at Simon-Kucher, has a very different read on what actually happened, and what it means for every InsurTech company trying to price its product right now. In Episode 171 of InsurTec...

Rick Zullo, Founder and Managing Partner of Equal Ventures, has never lost money on an insurance deal since founding his firm in 2018. When he started, his insurance portfolio generated under $2 million in combined revenue. Today it is between $250 and $300 million. In Episode 170 of InsurTechTalk, Rick breaks down the actual framework his firm uses to evaluate insurance startups (hint: traction a...

Golf tournaments, 650 speaker submissions, a free solo rock climber on the main stage, and a room full of insurance regulators that most attendees don't even know exists. In Episode 169 of InsurTechTalk, Nicole Peck (President, ITC) and Patti Harman (Head of Content, ITC) give a full behind-the-scenes preview of ITC Vegas 2026 — this year's theme, "Horizon of Possibilities," the...

Capital, underwriting, distribution, trust. Noam Inbar, General Partner at Viola FinTech, breaks insurance into four layers — and argues AI is commoditizing the middle while making the top layer more valuable than ever. In Episode 168 of InsurTechTalk, Noam walks through her path from teenage soccer referee to PayPal to Zooz to Forter to launching an early-stage fintech fund backed by The Phoenix,...

Detection is an arms race you cannot win. That's the core argument InReality Founder & CEO Jeppe Nørregaard makes in Episode 167 of InsurTechTalk, and it comes from someone who spent seven years working on AI-based misinformation detection before concluding the entire approach was structurally doomed. His pivot: stop trying to catch fakes after the fact. Instead, cryptographically prove conten...

Half a million bordereaux processed every year. Roughly half of Lloyd's Managing Agents as customers. And a data problem so persistent that Paul Templar has spent 17 years building the company that solves it. In Episode 166 of InsurTechTalk, Paul Templar, Co-Founder and CEO of VIPR Solutions, breaks down what Delegated Authority actually is, why bordereaux data remains one of the hardest unsolved...

A few episodes ago, Cheri Martinen revealed that GL policies are now excluding AI-generated content. The question she left unanswered: who verifies whether content is AI-generated when a claim arises? Yagub Rahimov, Founder & CEO of Polygraf.ai, is one of the answers. In Episode 165 of InsurTechTalk, Yagub explains how his AI behavioral control platform addresses the three AI threats insurance...

In 1998, Jon Kelly co-founded eCoverage — backed by SoftBank and Accel — with a one-line mandate: build the online version of Geico. Eleven months later, with no cloud infrastructure and no playbook, they issued their first policy. It became the first startup to sell car insurance online. In Episode 164 of InsurTechTalk, Jon Kelly — now CEO of Modern Metric — walks through three decades at the fro...

Jonathan Crystal opened Crystal Venture Partners on November 1, 2022. ChatGPT launched 30 days later. That timing tells you everything about where this conversation goes. In Episode 163 of InsurTechTalk, the third-generation insurance operator, former CFO of Crystal & Company, and Founder of Crystal Venture Partners joins me for a wide-ranging conversation on what he actually looks for in a fo...

Everyone talks about the AI boom in terms of compute, models, and software. Justin Levine spends his days thinking about something different: who insures the actual construction of the data centers, energy assets, and projects that make all of it possible. The AI race moved from the cloud to the construction site. And the construction site has an insurance problem. In Episode 162 of InsurTechTalk,...

Cheri Martinen never planned to sell her family's insurance agency. Then she took a meeting that surprised her. In Episode 161 of InsurTechTalk, the fourth-generation agent and Managing Principal at OneDigital shares what made the difference — and drops one of the most practically urgent insights of the season: standard GL policies are now excluding AI-generated content, effective April 2026....

Curtis Barton started ALKEME in the middle of COVID with seven agencies and $25 million in combined revenue. Five years later, it is a $350M+ brokerage operating in 35 states with over 85 acquisitions and backing from GCP Capital and Apollo S3.In Episode 160 of InsurTechTalk, Curtis breaks down the consolidation playbook in a way most people in the industry are not willing to say out loud — why mo...

What if AI's role in insurance claims isn't to replace the adjuster — but to be a second set of eyes that never gets tired? Heather Wilson, CEO of CLARA Analytics, joins InsurTechTalk episode 159 to explain how her company's claims AI platform — trained on roughly 10 million claims over a decade — surrounds every workers comp, auto liability, and general liability case 24/7, looking fo...

AI is everywhere in insurance right now — but is the industry actually ready for it? In episode 157 of InsurTech Talk, Gilad Shai sits down with Jack Siney, co-founder and CRO of FrontRace, to discuss the gap between AI hype and operational reality. Jack explains why most insurance organizations still struggle with disconnected systems, weak data infrastructure, outdated workflows, and incomplete...

What if insurance could pay out automatically — no adjuster, no claim dispute, no waiting? Sid Jha, CEO of Arbol, left a career trading commodities at Citadel to build exactly that. In Episode 158 of InsurTechTalk, Sid breaks down how Arbol went from a blockchain white paper in 2018 to a vertically integrated insurance platform spanning MGAs, a property carrier, and reinsurance — all purpose-built...

Surety bonds are one of the least understood—but most critical—segments in the insurance ecosystem. In Episode 156 of InsurTech Talk, I sit down with Gary Eastman, founder of SwiftBonds, to break down how this “unsexy” category quietly supports trillions of dollars in economic activity—and why it’s becoming increasingly relevant again. Gary started as an attorney doing probate work, discovered cou...

What happens when your core product works perfectly — but your customers still don't stick around? Adam Price, CEO of Kinetic Comp, joins InsurTechTalk episode 155 to unpack one of the most honest startup pivot stories in InsurTech: how Kinetic went from a wearable device company to a $100M+ workers comp MGA powered by claims oversight software — and why that shift was driven entirely by liste...

Most insurance leaders focus on distribution, underwriting, or AI. But there’s a quieter constraint slowing everything down: producer compliance and onboarding. In episode 154 of InsurTechTalk, Gilad Shai sits down with Luis Pino, CEO of ProducerFlow, to unpack the infrastructure layer behind insurance distribution—how carriers, MGAs, and agencies actually get producers licensed, appointed, and re...

In Episode 153 of InsurtechTalk, Gilad Shai sits down with Will Johnson, CEO and Co-Founder of Gyde, to unpack one of the most overlooked—and misunderstood—segments in insurance: health insurance distribution. This conversation goes beyond the AI hype cycle. It dives into the real bottleneck in insurance: the broker. Will shares how Gyde is building an AI-powered platform designed to help agency o...

Episode 152 of InsurTechTalk Kasey Roh--Head of US, Upstage AI: Building the “Perfect Marriage” Between OCR and LLMs. What happens when AI stops trying to boil the ocean—and instead solves one of the most painful, expensive problems in enterprise workflows? In this episode, I sit down with Kasey Roh, Head of US at Upstage AI, to unpack how a focused, infrastructure-first approach to AI is quietly...

InsurTech Under Fire — Resilience, Insurtech, and the Future of Insurance with Kobi BendelakWhat does resilience actually look like? In this episode, we sit down with Kobi Bendelak, who shares an unbelievable story: leading a delegation of 20 startups and 40 people out of Israel during wartime—when all flights were canceled. The solution? A 40-hour journey through the desert, crossing into Egypt,...

What happens when AI doesn’t just support insurance workflows—but replaces them? In Episode 150 of InsurTechTalk, James Benham breaks down what’s really happening inside insurance companies right now:Why ~30% of the workforce is stuck in manual clerical workThe growing shortage of underwriters and adjustersHow AI is reshaping core systems, workflows, and decision-makingWhy most “AI adoption” today...