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Guidewire buys a16z-backed UK insurance pricing startup for $2.1bn

Funding and deals

• Guidewire. Bought an a16z-backed London insurance pricing startup for $2.1bn, described as the largest acquisition of a private UK company.
• Flock. Ed Leon Klinger sold the insurance technology company he spent ten years building for over £100m.
• 809. The insurance quoting-infrastructure startup is raising an angel round before a larger raise, as it seeks FCA authorization and a first placement.

Guest interviews

• James Lowe, cofounder of Ethos. Ethos has grown 250x in six months to pass $500m in annual recurring revenue and about $100m of annualized net cash, with monthly revenue climbing from $200K to $43m. Lowe says AI will kill the gig economy but not real jobs, and Ethos pays half its margin as royalties to the employees and experts whose data trains enterprise models. He calls the model Spotify for the mind.
• William Loveday Powell, founder of 809. Powell says insurers and brokers still quote from Excel rating models, and that a Dublin bottling risk manager runs a $300m property portfolio entirely in Excel. 809 wants to give large enterprises an aggregator-like way to buy insurance and reinsurance at scale. He puts the global market at $4tn excluding life and says data-heavy sales cycles average 18 months, and his killer hire would be a technical broker with cat-modelling depth.
• Angela, investor at Version One Ventures. Angela argues legacy replacement is now urgent and that the hard part is implementing a new system rather than the software itself. She says customer service with Decagon works well and Factor Labs uses computer use on legacy systems, while general knowledge work has lagged. She puts enterprise AI adoption at 1% and says her prediction that full adoption would take five years now looks optimistic.
• James Foster, partner at Andreessen Horowitz. Foster backs founders he calls weapons, high-throughput people who set their own targets, his version of Keith Rabois's barrels and ammunition. He looks for a Monte Cristo quality of revenge, founders fixing a problem they lived through, and cites LEO, a Munich procurement startup, and Chutor Robotics. He predicts an AI-native AppLovin selling ad units inside ChatGPT and Character.ai.
• Fabian, cofounder of Frontier Fellows. Fabian raised $160K to rent a Palo Alto house for Frontier Fellows, which housed 75 residents and hosted more than 100 event guests. He says Munich investors wanted strings attached while San Francisco offers optimism, and that AI's opportunity dwarfs Anthropic's $40tn target market, which is just the salaries of inefficient processes.