Pace, an agentic AI startup focused on insurance operations, has raised $10 million in Series A funding from Sequoia Capital, underscoring accelerating investor interest in artificial intelligence applications across the insurance sector.
Founded in 2024 by CEO and co-founder Cuffe, Pace develops AI-driven systems designed to automate operational processes in insurance, particularly those traditionally handled through business process outsourcing (BPO). The company’s platform aims to transform how insurers manage large-scale workflows involving submissions, claims, and complex documentation.
Cuffe’s connection to the insurance industry runs deep. He grew up across multiple cities due to his father’s career at Lloyd’s of London and later built experience in startups before returning to the sector with Pace. “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 counts Prudential, The Mutual Group, and Newfront among its customers. The company operates in a market with significant scale: in insurance alone, BPO represents around $70 billion in annual spend, rising to an estimated $400 billion when broader financial services operations are included. “That’s the part of the market that Pace really addresses,” said Bryan Schreier, the Sequoia partner leading the deal, who previously 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 in this $100 billion market is AI because it’s a perfect fit.”
The company’s value proposition is rooted in AI’s ability to process large volumes of technical documentation, a defining feature of insurance workflows. “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.”
The funding round highlights a broader shift in the insurance industry, as carriers and intermediaries increasingly explore agentic AI to modernise operations, reduce reliance on outsourcing, and improve efficiency at scale.
As enterprise AI adoption accelerates, Pace’s approach reflects a growing belief among investors and industry leaders that automation and intelligent agents could fundamentally reshape how insurance organisations manage their core operational processes.
