London-based Ancep, which builds AI agents for commercial insurance brokers, has raised $8.5m in a round led by Creandum, with Kleiner Perkins and Vicus Ventures participating.
Angel investors in the round include former Aon CFO Christa Davies and operators from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind. The round type was not disclosed. According to the announcement, the funds will support growth and hiring.
Ancep's AI agents automate routine stages of insurance placement for commercial brokers. They review client submissions, prepare brokers' standard documents and approach insurers for quotes by email, portals or APIs, working inside brokers' existing systems. Only an authorised broker can bind a policy, and broking teams review the agents' outputs.
Ancep estimates that up to 30% of the risks brokers receive fall below the threshold that justifies the work, and that around half of these could be placed profitably.
"What we sell is net new revenue. Plenty of people are betting brokers get disintermediated. We think the opposite: brokers have huge leverage, and no chatbot is going to replace it. So we are not building around them, we are building for them, and we are starting with the twenty largest in the world," said Gagan Khurana, co-founder and CEO of Ancep.
The company's agents are live at A.C.I.C. Financial Advisory in Austria, a top 10 UK broker and the specialty lines of a leading US broker. At one customer, a divisional chief operating officer reported a 10% revenue increase in six weeks after deployment, according to the announcement.
"Gagan and Jake built something that works within the systems those firms already run, meaning they are live and expanding across lines of business within weeks. Most AI in this market is a bet against the intermediary, but Ancep is the first company we have seen that makes it more valuable instead," said Simon Schmincke, partner at Creandum.
Ancep was founded in 2026 by Gagan Khurana and chief technology officer Jake Turner, who previously worked together at Scope AI.
