Slingshot
Confidential

The carrier built for the market the incumbents were built wrong for.

AI-native insurance infrastructure for the embedded economy.

April 2026
Seed Round
The Tension

Insurance is a $3 trillion industry still running on email and Excel.

Six months to onboard a partner. Eight months to launch a product. Spreadsheets emailed between people who have never met. Reinsurers arguing over data they cannot verify. Somewhere in the middle, a founder with a great idea -- waiting on hold.

The Market Has Inverted

200 years of optimization. For the wrong market.

Legacy carriers built economics for rare, catastrophic events -- the burning house, the totaled car, the hundred-million-dollar program. The growth market is now small, frequent, and embedded in every checkout.

Legacy Model
Low
frequency
High
volume per policy
Min. program size
$20M+
Inverted Market
High
frequency
Low
volume per policy
Avg. policy premium
$25
Market Opportunity
$18B
Embedded insurance today
$1.4T
Embedded insurance by 2034
Growth Rate
30%+ YoY
Tech-Forward MGAs
10,000+
Embedded MGAs
700+
Currently Served
Virtually none.

We are not capturing TAM. We are creating the TAM that legacy carrier economics made impossible.

Why Existing Solutions Fail

You cannot bolt embedded onto legacy.

Fronting Carriers
Provide paper and nothing else. 5% fee for forwarding faxes. No technology, no transparency, no accountability. Six-month onboarding is standard.
State National, Trisura, Concert
Carrier-as-a-Service
Technology wrappers that do not own the carrier. When complexity arrives -- filings, reinsurance, claims disputes -- you discover the infrastructure is rented.
Boost, Sure, Foxquilt
Legacy Tech Carriers
Built for $5,000 policies at low frequency. Their OpEx base requires $20M+ programs to break even. A $25 policy at checkout is architecturally impossible.
Lemonade, Root, Kin
Introducing Slingshot

The Stripe of insurance.

A fully licensed, AI-native insurance carrier built from the first line of code for the high-frequency, embedded market that legacy carriers cannot serve.

Carrier Capacity
Real licenses. Real surplus. Real carrier -- not paper, not rented.
AI Operating System
Purpose-built, ground-up infrastructure. Not vendors stitched together.
Data Trust
Every data object has a birth certificate. Audit-ready by default.
MGA Collective
Curated partner network. Intelligence compounds with every member.
The Architecture

Every data object has a birth certificate.

01
Artifact-Based Data Trust

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.

8% market saturation
02
Institutional Memory

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.

5% market saturation
03
Vertically Integrated

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.

5% market saturation
Business Model

A technology company that owns a carrier.

Carrier Fee
~5% of GWP per policy. Industry-standard rate, dramatically more value. Full-stack AI operations, not paper.
Progressive Risk Retention
As data matures, retain 10-20% of risk on well-performing books. Expands net margins from 5% toward 20%.
Reinsurance Optimization
Better data creates better economics for the entire chain. Reinsurers release collateral faster when they trust the numbers.
Advisory Services
Product design, actuarial advisory, MGA bootstrapping, regulatory filings. Revenue from teaching the category.
Net Margin Trajectory
Year 1
~5%
Year 3
~12%
Year 5
~20%
Unit Economics

The math is the moat.

Legacy Carrier
Employees for $2B revenue 500
Minimum viable program $20M+
Onboarding timeline 6 months
Product launch 8+ months
Vendor contracts 16+ systems
Slingshot
Target team at scale ~50
Minimum viable program $1M
Onboarding timeline Weeks
Product launch Weeks
Vendor contracts 0 -- built in-house
Early Traction

Building in public. Shipping in private.

1
Carrier Acquisition
Shell carrier in advanced stages. Form A approval in process. Targeting June 2026 operational launch.
1st
Customer On Day One
Vertical Insure -- co-founder Brock's embedded insurance MGA. 400,000+ policies. Our product is being built with the customer at the table.
OS
Prototype Built
Slingshot OS prototype operational. CEO writes production code. BlankMetal (Rally portfolio) as development partner.
700+
Embedded MGAs
Target market growing at 30%+ YoY. Price-inelastic customers embedded in checkout flows with high switching costs.
Strategic Advantage

Rally Ventures. Founding partner.

Not a board seat and a check. Hands-on from the first line of code.

Operational Support

GPs actively involved in initial build, strategic decisions, and carrier acquisition. BlankMetal -- Rally portfolio company -- serves as development partner.

Portfolio Go-to-Market

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.

Category Credibility

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 Ask

Seed Round

Capital to acquire and capitalize a carrier shell, build the full Slingshot OS, hire the founding team, and onboard the first cohort of embedded MGA partners.

Use of Funds

Every dollar has a destination.

40%
Carrier Acquisition + Capital
Shell acquisition, statutory surplus, regulatory
30%
Technology + Platform
Slingshot OS, data infrastructure, AI systems
20%
Team + Operations
Founding hires, legal, insurance expertise
10%
Go-to-Market
MGA onboarding, partnerships, brand
Why Now

This window is 18 months wide.

AI capabilities crossed the threshold
A year ago, the models were not good enough. Now they can handle actuarial reasoning, regulatory compliance, and data normalization at carrier-grade quality.
Embedded insurance is at inflection
30%+ YoY growth. Every SaaS platform, every checkout, every digital marketplace is discovering insurance as a revenue line. No carrier exists to serve them.
Legacy carriers cannot pivot
Swiss Re tried with iptiQ -- $750M revenue, unlimited capital -- and is selling it off. The problem is not capital. It is architecture. You cannot bolt embedded onto legacy.
Software engineering is commoditized
The advantage is no longer in building software. It is in knowing what to build. Insurance domain expertise combined with modern architecture is the rare combination.
First-mover compounds
The institutional memory engine creates a data moat. Every MGA that joins makes the platform smarter. Day 1 performance equals Year 5 knowledge. Competitors will say they do what we do before they build what we build. The data lead is the moat.
Slingshot

We are not rebuilding insurance. We are building what insurance was supposed to have all along.

The only carrier whose economics were built from the first line of code for the market that actually matters.

ethan@slingshot.co
Appendix

Supporting Detail

Appendix A

The Team

Ethan
Co-Founder + CEO

Former Chief Actuary and Chief Data Officer at Palomar -- a $10B public carrier with $2B in top-line revenue.

Fellow-level actuary who writes production code. The rare combination of insurance domain mastery and technical architecture ability.

Saw firsthand that institutional resistance to data and AI innovation was intractable -- not because the people were incompetent, but because the architecture was incompatible. Left to build what could not be built inside an existing carrier.

Brock
Co-Founder + First Customer

Founder of Vertical Insure -- an embedded insurance MGA processing 400,000+ policies at $25 average premium.

Experienced every pain point from the MGA side: six-month carrier onboarding, opaque data, carriers that "provide paper and nothing else."

The voice of the customer permanently at the founding table. What Brock needs is what every embedded MGA needs.

Justin
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 channel for MGA acquisition at zero customer acquisition cost.

Appendix B

Competitive Landscape

107 competitors analyzed across three competitive rings. The market is crowded but undifferentiated. Zero competitors score above 1 on institutional memory or artifact-based data trust.
Claim
AI-Powered
75%
Claim
Speed-to-Market
85%
Claim
Cloud-Native
70%
Claim
Data-Driven
80%
Slingshot
Artifact Data Trust
8%
Slingshot
Institutional Memory
5%
Slingshot
Sub-$20M Programs
3%
Slingshot
Embedded-Only Carrier
3%
Appendix C

Product Architecture

MGA
Vertical Insure
MGA
SaaS Founder
MGA
Embedded Partner
Slingshot OS
Proprietary AI Operating System
Data Trust
Birth certificates. Chain of custody.
Memory Engine
Compounding intelligence.
AI Agents
Underwriting. Compliance. Reporting.
Analytics
Real-time. Snapshot. Auditable.
Carrier License
Slingshot Carrier Entity
E&S approved. Statutory surplus. Regulatory compliant.
Reinsurance Capital
Treaty Partners
Data quality earns better terms. Collateral released faster.
Appendix D

Financial Trajectory

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.
Appendix E

First-Mover Advantages

Data Moat Compounds Daily

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.

Reinsurance Relationships Compound

Better data earns better treaty terms. Better terms attract more MGAs. More MGAs generate more data. The flywheel is architectural, not commercial.

$40M+ Capital Barrier

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.

Switching Costs Are Structural

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.

Category Definition

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.

Embedded Customers Are Sticky

$25 policies embedded in checkout flows have near-zero price elasticity and extreme switching costs. Once integrated, the carrier relationship is infrastructure, not a vendor contract.