What do London, New York, and Bermuda all have in widespread? In the event you ask Jamie Cuffe, the reply is that every is a significant insurance coverage hub.
Cuffe grew up throughout all three cities, as his father labored for Lloyd’s of London, the world’s oldest and most vaunted insurance coverage market. He spent years in startups and has come full circle: In the present day, Cuffe is the CEO and cofounder of Tempo, an agentic AI startup centered on insurance coverage operations, particularly round enterprise course of outsourcing (or BPOs).
“The Web is admittedly what gave rise to outsourcing,” mentioned Cuffe. “Within the Nineties, 2000s, for the primary time, you might principally do that work wherever you had been and ship it again. Now we’re seeing the identical factor, the place all of this work that was being outsourced offshore can now be outsourced to AI.”
Tempo—based in 2024 by Cuffe—counts Prudential, The Mutual Group, and Newfront amongst its clients. The startup simply raised $10 million in Collection A funding from Sequoia Capital, Fortune has completely discovered. In insurance coverage, the BPO market is round $70 billion in annual spend, and for those who embrace the broader monetary companies operations across the business, that quantity ticks as much as $400 billion, mentioned Cuffe.
“That’s the a part of the market that Tempo actually addresses,” mentioned Bryan Schreier, the Sequoia accomplice main the deal, who labored with Cuffe at his final startup, Cheer, which offered to Retool in 2020. “The thesis behind Tempo is that the following wave of disruption on the operations facet of insurance coverage—this $100 billion market—is AI as a result of it’s an ideal match.”
Every of their means, each Schreier and Cuffe level out one thing I’ve considered many instances: That AI is an distinctive reader of huge portions of fabric. It’s significantly suited to duties that contain mountains of paperwork and technical verbiage. It’s why the “AI second” hit the authorized business so onerous, with the rise of mega-unicorns like Harvey and Legora. Cuffe argues that is why an “AI second” is clearly coming for insurance coverage.
“Authorized took off first as a result of copilots had been helpful, and there have been lots of people doing that work,” Cuffe informed Fortune. “In insurance coverage, the duties are at a lot, a lot increased scale—a whole bunch of 1000’s or tens of millions of submissions, tens of 1000’s of claims, for a few of these insurers. They want to have the ability to course of that… The agent second is what’s unlocking the insurance coverage business for us.”
See you tomorrow,
Allie Garfinkle
X: @agarfinks
E mail: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.com
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This story was initially featured on Fortune.com
