What do London, New York, and Bermuda all have in common? If you ask Jamie Cuffe, the answer is that each is a major insurance hub.
Cuffe grew up across all three cities, as his father worked for Lloyd’s of London, the world’s oldest and most vaunted insurance market. He spent years in startups and has come full circle: Today, Cuffe is the CEO and cofounder of Pace, an agentic AI startup focused on insurance operations, especially around business process outsourcing (or BPOs).
“The Internet is really what gave rise to outsourcing,” said Cuffe. “In the 1990s, 2000s, for the first time, you could basically do this work wherever you were and send it back. Now we’re seeing the same thing, where all of this work that was being outsourced offshore can now be outsourced to AI.”
Pace—founded in 2024 by Cuffe—counts Prudential, The Mutual Group, and Newfront among its customers. The startup just raised $10 million in Series A funding from Sequoia Capital, Fortune has exclusively learned. In insurance, the BPO market is around $70 billion in annual spend, and if you include the broader financial services operations around the industry, that number ticks up to $400 billion, said Cuffe.
“That’s the part of the market that Pace really addresses,” said Bryan Schreier, the Sequoia partner leading the deal, who worked with Cuffe at his last startup, Cheer, which sold to Retool in 2020. “The thesis behind Pace is that the next wave of disruption on the operations side of insurance—this $100 billion market—is AI because it’s a perfect fit.”
Each in their way, both Schreier and Cuffe point out something I’ve thought about many times: That AI is an exceptional reader of massive quantities of material. It’s particularly suited to tasks that involve mountains of documents and technical verbiage. It’s why the “AI moment” hit the legal industry so hard, with the rise of mega-unicorns like Harvey and Legora. Cuffe argues this is why an “AI moment” is clearly coming for insurance.
“Legal took off first because copilots were useful, and there were a lot of people doing that work,” Cuffe told Fortune. “In insurance, the tasks are at much, much higher scale—hundreds of thousands or millions of submissions, tens of thousands of claims, for some of these insurers. They need to be able to process that… The agent moment is what’s unlocking the insurance industry for us.”
See you tomorrow,
Allie Garfinkle
X: @agarfinks
Email: [email protected]
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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
