What do London, New York, and Bermuda all have in widespread? In case you ask Jamie Cuffe, the reply is that every is a serious insurance coverage hub.
Cuffe grew up throughout all three cities, as his father labored for Lloyd’s of London, the world’s oldest and most vaunted insurance coverage market. He spent years in startups and has come full circle: At this time, Cuffe is the CEO and cofounder of Tempo, an agentic AI startup centered on insurance coverage operations, particularly round enterprise course of outsourcing (or BPOs).
“The Web is absolutely what gave rise to outsourcing,” mentioned Cuffe. “Within the Nineties, 2000s, for the primary time, you possibly can mainly do that work wherever you have been and ship it again. Now we’re seeing the identical factor, the place all of this work that was being outsourced offshore can now be outsourced to AI.”
Tempo—based in 2024 by Cuffe—counts Prudential, The Mutual Group, and Newfront amongst its clients. The startup simply raised $10 million in Sequence A funding from Sequoia Capital, Fortune has solely realized. In insurance coverage, the BPO market is round $70 billion in annual spend, and in the event you embrace the broader monetary providers operations across the business, that quantity ticks as much as $400 billion, mentioned Cuffe.
“That’s the a part of the market that Tempo actually addresses,” mentioned Bryan Schreier, the Sequoia companion main the deal, who labored with Cuffe at his final startup, Cheer, which offered to Retool in 2020. “The thesis behind Tempo is that the subsequent wave of disruption on the operations aspect of insurance coverage—this $100 billion market—is AI as a result of it’s an ideal match.”
Every of their manner, each Schreier and Cuffe level out one thing I’ve thought of many occasions: That AI is an distinctive reader of large portions of fabric. It’s notably suited to duties that contain mountains of paperwork and technical verbiage. It’s why the “AI second” hit the authorized business so onerous, with the rise of mega-unicorns like Harvey and Legora. Cuffe argues for this reason an “AI second” is clearly coming for insurance coverage.
“Authorized took off first as a result of copilots have been helpful, and there have been lots of people doing that work,” Cuffe instructed Fortune. “In insurance coverage, the duties are at a lot, a lot increased scale—lots of of hundreds or thousands and thousands of submissions, tens of hundreds of claims, for a few of these insurers. They want to have the ability to course of that… The agent second is what’s unlocking the insurance coverage business for us.”
See you tomorrow,
Allie Garfinkle
X: @agarfinks
E mail: [email protected]
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This story was initially featured on Fortune.com
