Slingshot
AI-native insurance infrastructure for the embedded economy.
The tension
For 200 years, insurance economics were designed for the rare and catastrophic -- the burning house, the totaled car, the $100M program. Carriers built 500-person operations around low-frequency, high-value transactions.
The world that needs insurance now looks nothing like that. Every small business. Every embedded checkout. Every $25 policy at 30% year-over-year growth. The actual growth market is high-frequency, low-volume, and embedded in software.
The math that protected the incumbents for a century is now the math that locks them out.
Legacy carrier economics
Slingshot economics
Market opportunity
Like Stripe for payments and Shopify for commerce -- when the infrastructure becomes accessible, the market multiplies.
Global insurance
$7T
Third-largest market in the US
Embedded insurance
$144B
Projected market by 2030
YoY growth
30%+
Embedded insurance segment
Embedded MGAs
700+
And growing as infrastructure unlocks
What legacy carriers optimize for
Where the growth is
Sources: Munich Re Embedded Insurance Market Report, Insurance Information Institute, Rally Ventures Market Analysis
The platform
Not another fronting carrier collecting 5% and forwarding faxes. Not a legacy system wrapped in a chatbot. A fully licensed carrier with fifty-state capacity and an operating system designed from the first line of code for the inverted market.
Real licenses. Real surplus. Real carrier -- not paper, not rented. Fifty-state E&S capacity.
Purpose-built, ground-up infrastructure. Not vendors stitched together.
Every data object has a birth certificate. Audit-ready by default.
Curated partner network. Intelligence compounds with every member.
"We are the only carrier whose economics were built from the first line of code for the high-frequency, low-volume, embedded insurance market that legacy carriers are structurally locked out of serving."
The architecture
Chain of custody and version history on every object. The bordereau number is provably the real number. Not the version after quiet adjustments nobody documented.
Intelligence compounds across every transaction, every partner. When an underwriter leaves a legacy carrier, the knowledge walks out the door. Our memory engine means it stays.
Built entirely in-house. No 16-vendor stack. No multi-year contracts creating technical debt. The Tesla approach: own the infrastructure because the supply chain cannot produce what is needed.
Competitive landscape
85% claim speed. 75% claim AI. 70% claim cloud-native. These are not differentiators. These are the sound of the market.
Claim
AI-Powered
Claim
Speed-to-Market
Claim
Cloud-Native
Claim
Data-Driven
Slingshot
Artifact Data Trust
Slingshot
Institutional Memory
Slingshot
Sub-$20M Programs
Slingshot
Embedded-Only Carrier
| Capability | Slingshot | Competitors avg. |
|---|---|---|
| Artifact-based data trust | 0/18 | |
| Institutional memory engine | 0/18 | |
| Sub-$20M program economics | 0/18 | |
| First customer as co-founder | 0/18 | |
| Snapshot vs. restated reporting | 0/18 | |
| Purpose-built for embedded MGAs | 1/18 | |
| Vertically integrated AI (no vendors) | 1/18 |
Based on analysis of 107 competitors across 3 competitive rings. 18 structurally similar competitors scored across 14 dimensions.
Business model
The carrier is the wedge. The infrastructure is the moat. We seek tech multiples, not carrier multiples.
~5% of gross written premium on every policy. Industry standard pricing, dramatically more value delivered -- full-stack AI operations versus bare-bones paper.
As data matures and actuarial credibility compounds, we retain a percentage of risk rather than ceding 100% to reinsurers. Expands net margins from 5% to approximately 20%.
Better data quality means less collateral required from reinsurers, which flows as better economics to our MGA partners. Their economics improve. Their loyalty compounds.
Actuarial advisory, product design, regulatory filings, MGA bootstrapping. The services layer that creates stickiness and accelerates partner revenue growth.
Margin expansion thesis
As institutional memory compounds and loss ratios prove out, we progressively retain risk on the balance sheet rather than ceding 100% to reinsurers. The data architecture makes the actuarial case for retention. The retention makes the margin case for investors.
Unit economics
Legacy Carrier
Slingshot
Financial projections
Year 1
$5M
GWP
MGA Partners
3-5
Year 2
$25M
GWP
MGA Partners
10-15
Year 3
$75M
GWP
MGA Partners
25-35
Year 4
$200M
GWP
MGA Partners
50-75
Year 5
$500M
GWP
MGA Partners
100+
Projections assume progressive risk retention beginning Year 2, expanding net margins from ~5% (pure fronting) toward ~20% (retained risk on mature books). Comparable trajectory to Stripe's first five years of merchant volume growth.
Traction
First customer
Brock built Vertical Insure as an embedded insurance MGA -- insurance at the point of checkout for sports registrations, pet insurance, event cancellation. He proved the model works. Then he experienced every pain point of the carrier relationship firsthand: six-month onboarding, opaque data, carriers who provide paper and nothing else.
So he became our co-founder and first customer. The voice of the MGA is permanently at the founding table. What Brock wants is what every embedded MGA wants.
400,000+
Policies processed
$25
Average policy premium
6+
Product lines
50%+
Price inelasticity
Development partner
AI development experts within the Rally ecosystem. Prototype already built. The engineering infrastructure is not a hiring problem to solve -- it is a partnership already in motion.
Pipeline
Shell carrier acquisition underway. Form A regulatory approval in process. Targeting operational launch by mid-2026. E&S approval enables nationwide coverage without state-by-state product filings.
OS prototype
Slingshot OS prototype operational. BlankMetal (Rally portfolio) as development partner. The platform is being built, not planned.
Strategic advantage
Not a board seat and a check. Hands-on from the first line of code.
GPs actively involved in initial build, strategic decisions, and carrier acquisition. BlankMetal -- Rally portfolio company -- serves as development partner.
Rally's playbook puts Slingshot in front of portfolio companies. Embedded insurance is a natural revenue line for vertical SaaS platforms in the Rally network.
Rally has backed embedded finance from its earliest days. Their thesis -- that every software company becomes a fintech company -- validates the embedded insurance opportunity.
The team
Co-Founder & CEO
Fellow-level actuary. Former Chief Actuary and Chief Data Officer at Palomar, a $10B public carrier. Managed $2B in top-line revenue with 500 employees. Writes production code. Left a successful career because the architecture could not be fixed from inside. The rarest combination in insurance: actuarial precision, technical architecture, and founder vision.
Co-Founder & First Customer
Built Vertical Insure -- embedded insurance at the point of checkout for sports, pet, event, and surety products. Experienced every carrier pain point from the MGA side. His journey from "I need insurance at checkout" to "my carrier burned me" to "I'm building the carrier from the inside" is the company's founding story. What Brock wants is what the market wants.
Co-Founder & Strategic Partner
Rally Ventures GP with deep experience across fintech, embedded finance, and insurance infrastructure. Brings the Stripe/Shopify thesis to insurance: when carrier infrastructure becomes accessible, the number of embedded MGAs grows 10-100x. Rally's go-to-market playbook and portfolio network provide an immediate distribution channel.
Key Team Member
Deep operational expertise across insurance technology and carrier operations. Brings hands-on experience building and scaling the infrastructure that connects carriers, MGAs, and reinsurers. A critical addition to the founding team -- bridging the gap between strategic vision and day-to-day execution in regulated insurance environments.
Chief Revenue Officer
Seasoned revenue leader with a track record of building go-to-market engines for insurance and fintech companies from early stage through scale. Owns the MGA partnership pipeline, onboarding experience, and revenue expansion strategy. The commercial engine that converts Slingshot's technical advantage into market share.
Why this team wins.
No other founding team in the insurance space combines a Fellow-level actuary who writes code, a co-founder who is the first customer and built the embedded MGA from scratch, and a venture partner with the embedded finance playbook and portfolio distribution. This is not three resumes. This is structural advantages that compound: domain expertise that cannot be hired, customer empathy that cannot be faked, and a distribution channel that cannot be bought.
The ask
Seed round to build the infrastructure for the inverted market.
18-month milestones
Operational carrier
Licensed, capitalized, and writing embedded insurance programs through Slingshot OS.
Differentiated brand
Recognized as the technology-first carrier in the embedded insurance space. Category-defining market position.
Reinsurance trust
Artifact-based data trust creates a structural advantage in reinsurance negotiations -- better data means better terms, better terms means better MGA economics.
Use of funds
Carrier Acquisition + Capital
Shell acquisition, statutory surplus, regulatory
Technology + Platform
Slingshot OS, data infrastructure, AI systems
Team + Operations
Founding hires, legal, insurance expertise
Go-to-Market
MGA onboarding, partnerships, brand
Why now
A year ago, the models were not good enough. Now they can handle actuarial reasoning, regulatory compliance, and data normalization at carrier-grade quality. Building this carrier two years ago was technically impossible.
30%+ YoY growth. Every SaaS platform, every checkout, every digital marketplace is discovering insurance as a revenue line. No carrier exists to serve them.
The EU AI Act and emerging US state-level insurance AI rules are turning data trust architecture from nice-to-have to mandatory. Carriers that did not build audit-ready infrastructure from the start will be retrofitting for years.
Swiss Re tried with iptiQ -- $750M annual revenue, unlimited capital -- and is now selling it off. The problem is not capital. It is architecture. You cannot retrofit a legacy carrier for the inverted market.
First-mover advantages
Every transaction across every MGA partner feeds the institutional memory engine. Year 2 data advantage is structurally unreachable by a Year 3 entrant. The platform gets smarter with every policy.
Birth certificates cannot be retroactively applied to data that was created without them. Every legacy carrier that wants to match our data lineage must rebuild their entire pipeline and discard everything that predates the rebuild.
Once an MGA's data flows through the Slingshot OS with artifact-level trust and institutional memory, migrating to another carrier means abandoning the intelligence layer entirely. The cost of off-boarding is functionally prohibitive.
Better data earns better treaty terms. Better terms attract more MGAs. More MGAs generate more data. The flywheel is architectural, not commercial.
By naming and owning "the inverted market," Slingshot defines the vocabulary competitors must borrow. When the market conversation is "high-frequency, low-volume, embedded," every entrant validates our thesis.
Carrier acquisition and statutory capital requirements create a significant barrier. Combined with technology build, regulatory approvals, and reinsurance relationships, the total cost to replicate exceeds $40M and 24+ months.
The only carrier whose economics were built from the first line of code for the market that actually matters.
Slingshot
Confidential -- for intended recipients only