Kay.ai, a pioneering startup developing AI co-workers designed to alleviate the burden of manual data entry for insurance brokers and agencies, has successfully raised $3 million in a seed funding round. The investment was led by Wing VC, with significant participation from South Park Commons, 101 Weston Labs, and a cohort of strategic angel investors.
This funding injection comes at a critical time for the insurance industry, which faces a projected shortage of nearly 400,000 workers by 2026, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Vishal Rohra, co-founder and CEO of Kay.ai, highlighted the industry’s struggle, stating, “Despite this looming talent shortage, brokers and agencies still spend up to 80% of their time on paperwork, weighed down by archaic systems and misaligned incentives. We eliminate that burden and act like a digital co-worker that handles the most tedious tasks so their team can focus on high-value work.”
Kay.ai’s innovative approach introduces AI co-workers that transcend traditional software and legacy Robotic Process Automation (RPA) tools. These AI co-workers are designed to understand existing workflows, interact seamlessly with existing tools, and adapt to individual preferences. This capability unlocks automation across a wide range of insurance processes, including submissions, renewals, and servicing, previously deemed too complex for automation.
The startup targets the $300 billion Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) market, where enterprises often delegate high-volume, repetitive tasks. However, BPOs are plagued by high employee turnover and performance management challenges, leading to slow turnaround times and costly human errors. Kay.ai’s AI co-workers offer a solution to these inefficiencies.
The newly secured funding will be strategically deployed to expand Kay.ai’s team and broaden its automation capabilities beyond quoting to encompass a comprehensive range of servicing workflows for insurance brokers, Managing General Agencies (MGAs), and carriers.
Kay.ai was founded by Vishal Rohra and Achyut Joshi, two immigrant entrepreneurs with extensive backgrounds in machine learning from tech giants like Microsoft, Twitter, Amazon, and Relyance AI. Their combined expertise, honed through work on AI initiatives across Azure, Xbox, MS Office, and data science at Amazon, positioned them to identify and address the operational inefficiencies plaguing the insurance back-office. Their participation in the prestigious South Park Commons Fellowship further solidified their vision and led to the creation of Kay.ai.
Currently, Kay.ai significantly reduces manual data entry time for quoting tasks. Insurance producers can simply forward emails or upload PDFs, and Kay.ai efficiently extracts key details, populates data across carrier portals, and generates quotes without requiring extensive onboarding or complex integrations.
Tanay Jaipuria, partner at Wing VC, emphasized the transformative potential of Kay.ai’s technology, stating, “The insurance industry still runs on manual workflows that create massive operational bottlenecks and prevent companies from scaling efficiently, particularly with a labor shortage that is becoming more acute over time. Kay.ai’s approach is transformative—they’ve built an AI co-worker that plugs directly into existing systems and can perform the most time-consuming and repetitive insurance workflows. Vishal and Achyut bring a rare combination of deep machine learning expertise and a relentless focus on product usability, positioning them perfectly to redefine how insurance work gets done.”
