¶ Intro / Opening
🎵 Music
Welcome to the FNO Insure Tech.
Rivers and shakers. Within the insurance. Gather and discuss. And Rob
Hey Podcast World, welcome to this week's edition. Of FNO InsureTech, yes, that one place where you can go to learn everything there is to know in the entire world. You think chat GPT, you think all these different LLMs out there are good? Well you should listen to one of our episodes.
Yeah, we're just like chat GPT. We're as You could. And the guests who do send us emails, they know we do respond. We really appreciate all of you guests writing us on sometimes a daily basis. And and we're here to answer all those all those emails.
all those emails because who's smarter than the combined mental bandwidth of Lee Boyd and Rob Beller? I don't think that could be
Oh, I can't be tough. Do you think that we should add the word AI to our podcast name? Do you think it would help us?
Yes. F N O andsure tech dot AI.
Dot A Ooh, that'd be nice. Yeah.
You need a dot AS.
If we did, we should probably do that before this gets released, before the the hordes of people steal our idea.
You know what's really cool is in five years we'll be able to say, remember five years ago when AI was like all that?
What will It kinda makes you wonder in five years will we even refer to it as AI or will it just be yeah the new norm? It's it is what it is, we systems and things today.
Maybe we'll say remember when we used to call it AI?
Yeah, yeah, we might do that. This'll be a good a good look back period. We can say, What did we talk about back then? Right. It's like it's like the founding of the internet, right? AI is it to be around during that time period to wonder what people talked about.
remember I was in graduate school. in nineteen ninety five and we had to put a website together. And it was unbelievable that there was this thing out there. Called the inner.
What am I gonna do with that?
I mean there wasn't it was so early that there wasn't like Starbucks dot com
Dominant.
Doc Domino's Doc. None of not none. No most had no websites already. There's lots of porn already, of course.
Oh Lord.
There was no big commercial organizations. And we had to put up a website. And we put up all things from other websites and moved up them out and made it and
You got an A. Well, think about being then who saw the value in the internet and decided they were gonna start a business.
Yeah.com
Call it Amazon.com, start with a book selling company, but always have a dream of doing more. Like, this is one of those times where people with the right idea, the know how and the ability are going to do some amazing things.
gonna do some amazing things. Yeah. There's people out there today, and today I think we might have even had one on our podcast.
We might have. We might have had somebody who thought, What am I gonna do with this changing world and this exciting thing called AI and how am I going to make a difference and do something amazing? We have him on today.
and create a remarkable lasting company. Yeah. We have with us today Amon Gore, who's the co founder and CEO of Further AI. And I want you guys to remember that name. Yeah. Further AI.
¶ Meet Aman Gour and FurtherAI Aman introduces FurtherAI and shares the company's mission to transform insurance using AI agents that automate real workflows across the value chain.
Yeah. I don't know, ten minutes just chatting about AI and San Francisco and and all that's going on. But then we finally break into what is further AI? How did it come about? What are you doing? And and they're and they're revolutionizing the way companies in the insurance vertical are working, creating these agents to help do task, but read from different life cycles throughout the policy, the claims.
to bring it all back to actually relate the data to one to another. It's an exciting thing. And he's such a delight to talk to. I can't wait for the audience to hear him.
Yeah. So that makes me think, why don't we stop talking?
Yeah. Hey, I do I do have to give a shout out. Um we actually got his name from a friend of ours, Jacob Sanders. Jacob Sanders. Cole called me one day. He is the son of a prominent person in the insurance space, a friend of ours, Eric Sanders. And I was like, Hey, I like what you're talking about, but how about we get your CEO on the podcast? And sure enough, they made it happen. So thanks. Thanks.
Thanks. Appreciate that. Thanks, Eric, for creating him. Yeah.
And thank you, Jacob, for getting him on the podcast. Doing the work. Yeah, for actually doing the work.
So without further ado, here is our interview with Amon Gore, CEO and co founder.
🎵 Music
Hey everybody, we are here with a very special guest who we've like taken an hour of his time to just talk about all kinds of weird and random things.
We didn't know.
We've decided that you know what, maybe we should do a podcast too.
We should share'em with the world.
So here we are here we are doing that now. And if in case you're not on video to see him, you would think he's our attorney. 'Cause he's kinda dressed like an attorney and had the background in his office and it's not a background. He works in this dark wood paneled office.
It's a beautiful wood bandolin. I love it.
Beautiful. We've all and we've invited ourselves to go there sometime. And so anyways, we have Amangower. with us today, who's the co founder and CEO at Further AI. Welcome to FNO and Truertech.
Welcome.
Rob Lee, thank you so much for having me. You guys are a blast. I already feel that there's gonna be a great podcast and I'm gonna have a great time. So thank you for having me.
If there's one thing we want you to do in the next forty five minutes, it's have fun. So
That's great. Let's do it. So
So let's get to it. So I've already spoiled the next question and that's where are you today? Do you live in San Francisco? Is that where you reside?
That is right. So we are actually in the Fidee area, Rob. Very close to actually the anthropic office and where all the action is. I get asked often that like we serve insurance companies which are in East Coast or Midwest, why in San Francisco? And the reason is that sort of we want it to be like what we bring to the industry is AI and we want it to be in the center of
¶ Why Build an AI Company in San Francisco A look inside the AI epicenter and why being close to innovation matters when building at the frontier of technology.
AI action. And that happens to be San Francisco right now.
Yeah, I I've told Lee I flew out, I live in Sacramento, I flew out of SFO not too long ago, and when you drive down the freeway in San Francisco, the billboard
Yeah.
Billboards on the side of the freeway like like there's billboards on any freeway or s or highway. The billboards are all AI companies. One after another after another. They're not buy a Chevrolet or get a Starbucks. It's about AI on the billboard.
It's a word used in every other sentence now, right?
What does that say about San Francisco and AI today?
Does it say that it's a mumble? I'm not playing, but does it?
But I hope not.
¶ AI Is Everywhere and It Is Moving Fast A lighthearted but insightful take on how AI has gone mainstream, even becoming part of everyday conversations.
It's funny, Rob, like you mentioned about AI. So a few months back I got a call from my grandmother and uh she's like eighty five, eighty six years old and called me and she's like, Come on, I've started using AI. And but that's interesting. Which AI are you using? Are you trying plod, chat GPT? Which is what what I was expecting that she would say. Or uh Gemini and she's like. So for me, AI stands for Amund Intelligence. Ha ha ha.
That's fantastic. I like that.
That's great. That's great. So
Work just as well. You're just as good as any of those other ones.
I don't think so. I think AI is much better than like humans in many, many, many areas in terms of intelligence. Like the entire world's knowledge compressed into a model, right? Like you can chat with it now. It's fascinating.
really unbelievable. I find myself bouncing ideas off of it and saying, Hey, it's you know, what is this idea? How can I expand this? What's better? I mean, I use it as a coworker all the time. I don't ever use it anymore. Like early on you would use it to like write an email or something. But now it's now it's I leverage it for the insight. Right? It's like a million books all put into one. It's fascinating. It's fascinating.
Yeah. That's true. Somebody said this, Lei, that like the first wave, like my mental model is always like what you said that to compare AI to a cohort but a teammate. But person said that the teammates, coworkers or animals in general have emotions. We have we need food and so on. So his comparison was that it's not animals. It's actually compare AI to ghost. Which can operate in the digital environment, do things for you, log into the system, reason, answer questions and so on.
I was like, that's an interesting way of thinking about it because what they were trying to say is they don't have emotions, they would not need food, things like that. They'll not get sick.
¶ AI as Coworker or Something More A discussion on how AI is evolving from a productivity tool into something closer to a digital operator that can execute tasks independently.
Yeah.
But isn't it funny? I always give it emotion. Because I'm human and it's so human like. Yeah. I give it the emotion. I I'm emotional to it. I expect emotion back. It gives it to me because it's nice and I haven't told it not to. But like it doesn't. There is no emotion. It just is there to work. It's there to do The wallies of the world, right? It's just AI is so fascinating. And I also assume going into San Francisco.
I mean, you're in you're in the middle of it. You're in the middle of what's happening and you've got to be walking around and talking to people different places who are who are thinking ten years, twenty years down the road, you're in this niche. that everyone's thinking it and everyone's moving. It's so fascinating. It's gotta be it's gotta be amazing.
Absolutely Lee. It's amazing and it's also pressure inducing as well, to be really honest. But I think everyone, like if you think about it, like executives are under pressure.
¶ The Pressure of the AI Moment Why companies, employees, and founders are all feeling the urgency to adapt as AI reshapes industries in real time.
Like for public companies to ensure that they're adopting AI. Employees are under pressure because nobody knows who's gonna lose their job. OpenEI or Anthropic is under pressure because they're competing very closely and don't want to lose the market share. Companies like Cowperse is under pressure because you want to ensure that we create lasting value on top of these models as well. So it's an interesting time in
uh sort of uh our existence where AI is coming up and we are all trying to figure out, okay, where do we fit in? Where do we do it? What does it even mean to be a human right now? Uh what does it mean mean to be a non worker? Yeah. Like knowledge used to be a commod like knowledge used to be power, but now it's a prompt. So
Right. Where where where is the knowledge? I mean, you you develop something. Is it something that could actually make you irrelevant in the long run?
Yeah. It it totally used to be the one with the knowledge was in charge, right? W one. They were the valuable you had the knowledge, right? And now it
No, I got it right here. I mean Google and you know, two thousand the internet kind of changed some of that and then Google changed it and you know, Yahoo and all those and but now we're at a whole nother level. And like I told Rob the other day, we're coming up where the graduating class of college and the graduating class of high school um they've all had
AI. They've all had large language models for these four years. What does the output look like now that we've educated these individuals with AI, right? They've had AI to help them. How is that going to change the trajectory of The workforce. Will it enhance? I don't know. I mean I am f I'm not a betting man, I'm not good at it, but it doesn't seem great I mean I'm j I'm just I am, but who knows? I who am I to guess? I don't want to go too negative, but yeah but yeah, it's very interesting.
Somebody on Twitter, this is not originally so somebody on Twitter said this one interesting one statement which has stuck with me and I'm sort of still thinking through it, but they said that We can all outsource our thinking to AI because it can think.
¶ Outsourcing Thinking vs Understanding A powerful insight: while AI can do the thinking, humans must still provide judgment and understanding.
But we cannot outsource our understanding to AI because we still need to understand what it is producing as an output and then build on top of that. So the out understanding and judgment still has to be human. Yeah, I can do thinking, work and in general we can delegate work to it.
How interesting. I kind of like that. It gives me a little hope that I'm still needed.
Let's pivot here for a second.
Why are we even talking about that?
This is a podcast. It's not the AI philosophy podcast, unless we've changed it since I was last here. Um
Thank you.
Let's let's
I thoroughly enjoyed that then.
Let's talk a little bit or let's segue into talking about further AI. So
Hey, obviously.
so give us a minute or two on on further what it is that you guys do and what the company's about.
Yeah, no, thanks for asking that, Rob and I think we can we should come back to insure tech. So let me introduce uh an insure tech that I really like, which is for their AI. So Further is an AI transformation partner for insurance companies. We have built a platform through which we can deploy AI agents for different use cases. So we have a library of AI agents that we can deploy
¶ What FurtherAI Actually Does How the platform deploys AI agents to automate underwriting intake, claims workflows, and other high volume insurance processes.
out of the box, but uh we can also partner deeply with different insurance companies on identifying the use cases where AI can really move the needle for them. build it and then deploy it for them. So in that way, think of like chat GPT for insurance, but instead of just doing question answer, it is actually automating the end to end work which involves
Processing documents and making decisions or embedding third party data models and so on. In terms of some real life use cases, we have seen a lot of success with on the underwriting side. I think the entire industry moved really fast on adopting AI for underwriting. And with the benefit of hindsight now I can say why as well.
possibly because in underwriting you're getting a submission and you need to understand that, overlay it with a lot of information and then sort of once it's available then that's a human taking a judgment. So we have
Seen a rapid adoption of AI for underwriting intake, triage, and so on. And on the claim side we are seeing adoption of AI for similar use cases. These are use cases which previously were done by somebody manually and in that way AI we have like a platform and then we provide uh AI agents for different insurance workflows in a nutshell.
And so where did this idea come from? Right? You're the you're the CEO, you're the co founder. Where where did this idea come from? Was it I'm not gonna fill in your words. Where did the idea come from?
Yeah, just just answer the question instead.
Instead of me just guessing over and over and over and you're like no that's completely wrong.
If you give Lee enough rope, okay, go ahead, please. I'm gonna go.
No, so uh I have I've had a career in applied AI, Lee and so I started my career at Microsoft, had fun building uh technology at Microsoft, uh and deploying for real life use cases. So you're working with different
¶ Founder Origin Story Aman's journey from Microsoft to building and exiting an AI recruiting startup, and why he chose to start again.
governments of different states and deploying AI for community training. That's that was my start of the career. But then um from there I started another company in AI for recruiting. Where we were looking at their resume databases at enterprises and helping them find the right talent for every job. Had fun doing that, run it for four and a half years. Um
After an exit from that, like I had an exit from that, nothing crazy, nothing life defining, but good enough that as a good Indian son I could buy my father a house and my brother a car. That's wonderful. Good for you. Thank you.
Wow. Good for you.
Thanks Rob. But I think it was okay, but I felt that I was still not happy with the outcome because I felt that yeah, I was successful recently, but the definition of success in my head was a company that goes public where it has now its own ticker. Uh so it becomes uh entity in itself.
And I was complaining, whining and everything else to my wife and she I think had enough of it one of those days and said that okay, why don't you start again? It seemingly is a great time to be building a company. Because there is a fundamental shift that is happening. This was in twenty twenty three. Chat GPT was just announced and so on. I reached out to a friend of mine who was an AI researcher at Apple. So he was building language models at Siri. This is the same guy who is like
I studied together, like also the smartest person that I know in my network. So I just thought, okay, what's happening? Is this a fad? Because back in twenty twenty three we were thinking about it being a bubble as well. Right. Right? Okay. This is this could be is this like crypto? He said that no, I'm like really deep into it and uh if the scaling laws apply.
We are living gonna be living in massively different world in the next three to four years. And it is happening right now. Now we are talking about AI philosophy for that reason, right? Uh exactly. So I asked him then, okay. Would you wanna start a company with me? So he I he accepted the offer and we started building, but we had no idea what we would be doing. Uh we both knew AI, uh we knew tech. I've built a company before.
But you didn't know what vertical.
Yeah. Yeah. What problem would we want to be solving and so on? So but the basic overarching theme was that there is a lot of work that humans have to do today manually. Now AI agents will do that work. And that's a big market in itself. Like the labor market globally is about ten point five trillion dollars.
¶ The Pivot That Changed Everything How an early idea was labeled a "tar pit" and forced a major pivot that ultimately led to insurance.
compared to software market, which is about three hundred billion dollars only. So we saw that massive shift that now became a service as a software category in itself. So you're thinking about what to do, apply it to YC, Rog, with the idea of like building AI agents for testing.
got through Y C. Interestingly within the first few weeks of Y C we bumped into one of the Y C partners, Michael Siebel, and uh I pitched the idea of what we are doing. So yeah, we are building AI agents to automate software testing. And he looked at us, he thought about for it for a bit and he's like, This is a tarp it idea. Uh
A what idea?
Tarpet. Tarpet idea. So an idea which looks very shiny uh and good to engineers. Uh, but it would never become a billion dollar. So we pivoted. Uh and imagine like imagine two
Yeah.
Men with shiny eyes and like fairy tale pitching the idea and being told that this is a torpid idea.
Yeah, you were so excited you were so excited and someone was like, oh that's that's really pretty but now. Oh and you're like, oh, okay. So a pivot occurred, a pivot occurred.
It it was a hard pivot, uh Lee's like we had no idea. uh for like three to four months what we would be doing. And Y C is interesting because Y C is really fast. Like things happen every week. Yeah. So other founders were making a ton of progress. There were two of us who had no idea what we would be doing. Uh Y C. So then our the partner at YC was Tom Bloomfield and he always had a lot of
faith and belief in us. Uh he's the one who shortlisted us for YC. So he said that I'm on you guys are a good combination of a hacker and a hustler. Like I'm the hustler. My co-founder is like a hacker, literally smart person who can hack systems and so on.
¶ Why Insurance Became the Focus Breaking down why insurance rose to the top as the ideal industry for AI transformation.
So why don't you pick a vertical and commit to that? And his name was Tom Bloomfield. Uh I told Tom, Tom, I have no idea about any vertical. I have done recruiting before, AI for recruiting, and I have PTSD from that. So I don't wanna do AI for recruiting again. So he's like, pick an industry and really go partner with it.
So then we looked at sort of we're like now we're thinking about like intellectuals that okay, what industry should we pick? The industries with lot of unstructured data, shrinking margin, labour shortage. And insurance came on the top of the list. um and we saw that legal already had harvey and lagora and Uh we saw that okay, maybe that might be too late. Let's look more deeply into insurance.
Had n done nothing in insurance before, had no idea of insurance. We like literally took a box of donuts, drove around the Bay Area from one state farm agent to the other.
¶ Learning Insurance from Scratch The now famous story of driving around with donuts to meet brokers and understand the industry firsthand.
Trying to understand what is policy checking, what is COI. But One thing I build a significant appreciation for uh like the insurance industry as a whole. It's like so relationship driven. I feel that it's one of the industry with the best people in it.
Uh it's traditionally labeled as sexy and boring, but I personally find it super interesting. It's one of the business models that have existed for two fifty years and it's not going anywhere. It's just growing and so on. So develop that fascination for insurance. Uh and started going deep in it, started building for it, uh and like really partnered with it so far. And I joke now that I'll pass a broker exam if I take it. It's been two and a half years of building for insurance. Yeah.
I know.
Yeah. Can do a bit of underwriting myself and so on. Nothing like an expert underwriter or a broker, but a makeshift one for sure. And also learned that a lot of people stumbled in insurance as well. So my story is not unique that way. It's part of the story of insurance in itself.
And that is fascinating. I don't think this would have happened in any other industry as such, but grateful for insurance, grateful for people of insurance and building for it as well. And want to do my time and service. Uh right in shotgun.
I love that. And you're absolutely right. The number of wonderful, great people who have stumbled into insurance is Unbelievable. Very rarely do you hear anybody say, No, I was born and bred and I'm ready for insurance. This is the trajectory of my life. This is where I'm going. Most conversations we have are
I was lucky enough to stumble into this crazy vertical. Yeah. And I will say a vertical that helps the world go round. Oh yeah. Without insurance, companies can't exist, homes can't be bought. Like insurance helps. the world move on. So it is at times kind of a bory and unsexy, but it's so pivotal. It's so pivotal.
And let's not forget hundreds and hundreds, if not trillions Hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of dollars of business.
Yeah.
It's not it's not from a financial or economic perspective small.
Yeah.
It's gigantic.
Big one.
And it's a huge vertical that has all kinds of things going on. Yeah. And because of companies like yours and others, it's on fire with opportunity.
Yeah.
Yeah. Right. Is that what you're finding?
That is what we are finding, uh, Rob. Like we also find that the technology built for insurance so far hasn't been Great. I think like insurance runs on a lot of unstructured data. The emails, the policy forms, and so on. So the first wave of technology one point oh in insurance was you move from pen and paper to digital systems.
¶ Why AI Fits Insurance So Well How unstructured data, manual workflows, and operational complexity make insurance a prime candidate for AI.
But still, there was human doing the work and here humans were doing the work. I feel we are living in the second big transformational era. of insurance where systems store the data, AI does the work, and humans are responsible for judgment and understanding. And that shift, somebody this is one of our customers who told us that moving from Moving to turbo high, uh moving to further AI has been Like moving from typewriter to a computer.
So that's like that massive transformational shift, Rob, that we are seeing. And that is why this like there is such substantial opportunity for AI in insurance. And people are seeing it as well. Like anybody who has thought for more than five minutes of where L LMs can make tremendous impact. And that was us as well two and a half years back.
And so tell me this, whenever you go to a client and you tell them you can help'em.
Yeah.
you selling? Is it a a platform that they live on? Is it outside of where they are and it gives them actionable insights and and what is the product you're selling? Yeah.
I think n when we speak with executives and insurance right now, everybody understands now the ma impact that AI is gonna have in the industry, on the expense ratios, loss ratios, and so on. So that's no more a sell that we have to do. It now comes down to how would that happen? Everybody knows that okay AI would automate a lot of workflows and so on. But how would that happen? What is the right way to make that happen? And so on.
¶ Automating the Entire Lifecycle Why FurtherAI is focused on connecting workflows across underwriting, claims, and servicing, not just solving one piece.
So our approach is slightly contrarian here, Lee and Rob, where we say that We use a model router, which and consists of multiple language models. Around that we automate work. We work with the existing systems to automate workflows. We identify workflows which are repetitive, manual, high volume and so on. And then we deploy AI to automate it. So at day zero, it's as simple as one workflow, AI automated the workflow.
At day N, now you have multiple such workflows and you can automate those on further AI. But now the big thing that we are seeing unlock, like once you have automated multiple workflows on further AI. You can literally like any executive in insurance wants to ensure that different departments are talking to each other. The data from claims is informing underwriting is informing policy servicing and the likes. But now that dream is becoming a reality.
So in that way, we are operating across the value chain, we are working across distribution, underwriting, policy servicing claims, automating these workflows, and then connecting it all together.
That's that that is different than a lot of the companies. They're looking at just underwriting. You're saying that the value is in the life cycle. Yeah. I agree. I agree.
That's
Yeah.
The execution there sorry, sorry Rob, please go ahead.
Please.
Yeah. Um, I think the contrarian take Lee is it's gonna be hard to do and work across the lifecycle and build a really good software product that can do that well. But that's the promise that if we are looking at building for just in the writing. Yes, I can build a company, I can exit from it, make some money, and so on. I have done that before.
My real goal right now is sort of build for insurance, solve the problems that were really, really hard and in doing so, hopefully we'll build a company that goes public. Like they're obsessed about building a company that goes public, like so much so that our Wi Fi password at our office in San Francisco is F R A I underscore Nasdaq underscore twenty.
That is your mission. That's your mission to build a great company who is willing who is able to go public.
¶ Building for the Long Term Aman shares his goal of building a company that goes public and the decisions required to get there.
And to do that we have to do a lot of things, right? We have to hire and train and build a great culture as as a team. We have to ensure that whosoever we work with, we make them super successful, because insurance is big and small at the same time. Uh, if we can make a few partners successful, they are becoming our biggest marketing channel and revenue channel. They are referring us to more partners and so on. And you have to build a great product which has a huge mode. Now
We're working back and take decisions which are not short term decisions, long term decisions and things like that. One is what we talked about, being a entire policy lifecycle product.
So you see yourself as a vertical AI founder. Is is that
Correct?
And that's kind of a little bit what we're talking about here. Explain to us what that is and because I think it's a very important concept in general in the time that we're
Yeah, absolutely Rob. So I think a lot of AI companies previously had a formula of a domain expert and a tech founder.
¶ The Rise of Vertical AI Why success in AI depends on deep domain expertise and solving real industry specific problems.
coming together and building for that vertical. I think in AI it's slightly changing where you can be a tech founder, you can be two tech founders, but you have this appreciation and interest in an industry and you're really going deep and partnering with it.
And building for it.
happen in legal with Ligora, for example, billing for it. Seeing that happen in healthcare with Hippocratic AI building for it. We're seeing that in investment banking, where heavier Is building. One fun thing is like all of these companies are also backband recent Autowitz, like further AI. But uh that's that's the vertical AI, where you really go deep into an industry and partner with it and solve core need of it rather than trying to
I I I think that and we're seeing that across AI, right? Across the AI bit industry, creating specific AI solutions for specific problems or industries. And that's kind of that that must be what that must be Andre Sinhorowitz's thesis.
That is true. It's also one thesis where Rob um If you're trying to be a wrapper around the open AI and Cloud models, Like you're not gonna be building a lasting note. Whereas at Froger AI, we are doing the technology, but we are also bringing in a lot of domain expertise. On top of that, we are also solving the last mile, which ends up being the entire problem in itself.
Like a lot of horizontal softwares have not been able to do justice to the complexities of insurance. And that ends up being our mode. Like we haven't been doing the hard things from day zero because we feel that if you do the hard things now, you build a lasting company.
So tell me this, is it hard? To navigate the company when the rules were changing so quickly, the tools are changing, the the technology is changing so quickly. You're you're not just building houses and you got the wood in and you're built you know, might be a different type of uh material. You're like
¶ Navigating Rapid Change How founders operate in an environment where the technology is evolving faster than ever before.
AI is rapidly changing. That's gotta be exciting but difficult at the same time, I would think.
This is this is really funny, Lee, that you mentioned this because just this morning I told my wife that it's fascinating how fast things are moving. It's not that we haven't seen Platform ships before. We saw that with internet, we saw that with mobile, and so on. But for the first time, this plat like the pace of change. is unmatched with AI. Like the speed at which things are moving and changing and
So on.
is just very different. We are all operating in a shrunken margin, like uh time window.
Yeah.
It's exciting, yes. There is a lot to do. It's not easy, for sure. Uh and I'll be very honest here, Lee and Rob. But I come back to the original thing of why are we starting a company to build a company that goes public? So this is all a part and parcel.
And you want to be a winner in this race. Um, but you know, I would think that just from a competitive landscape perspective, it's very challenging because obviously there's other competitors who've seen the opportunity that you see. who are building quickly for it, as quickly as they can. They're racing you. Right? And so you really have to be watching your shop, but looking over your shoulder. Every day because the pace of change is so rapid.
That that is definitely true, Rob. But I would just say that I think we are all running our own races and we're all coming from different places and different insights and building different things. There will be overlaps and everything else. But At the end of the day it would be about like me the best มันวิน อร์ มันวิน อร์ มันวิน ร์ มันวิน
I got it.
It's gonna be about execution, Rob. It's gonna be about making partners successful. It's gonna be about doing the hard things, even if it is hard and challenging and so on. So it's a test of like me if I'm a great founder and CEO or not.
And whether I enjoy this journey or whether I'm doing it for some some other reasons, which are possibly short term. I'm doing it for long term reasons. I'm doing it because I want to do this. I really want to build a company that is successful. I wanna make my partner successful.
I wanna make our investors successful. Hopefully Further AI becomes a place where a lot of people then build their own companies down the line, like a PayPal mafia of kind. So Doing it for the right reasons and I feel then that shifts from anxiety to motivation and huh, excitement. Lost day. It's not gonna there's no boring day.
Well you know, people obviously are excited with you. In our notes we see that you you started just recently, what, two thousand twenty five. You had a seed round. You quickly followed that by a series A round of, you know, a great round there, right?
I mean so quickly. What are the investors seeing in you that they're saying, We're gonna go after you? We we believe in you. There's AI, there's everything. Is it the the team you've built? Is it the mission you have? What are they looking at there?
I think in general insurance is a great industry to be building for right now.
I agree.
It has been labeled as slow to adopt technology, but now I can argue that it's not that insurance was slow to adopt technology. It was a technology which was not solving the core need. And now you have that platform shift. Secondly, Rob, we have also been in the right place at the right time. So we are not too old as a company that we cannot continuously optimize and work with the models that are coming in and cannot improvise.
But we are not too young that we do not have customers who have tested it and so on. So it's just that right balance is where we are at right now. But we have proven ourselves. as a company and as a team, as a product, but also we are continuously iterating and we don't have the debt, tech debt of the past. So that is another reason where we are seeing rapid traction. I also feel that
¶ Scaling in a Risk Averse Industry How FurtherAI wins customers by reducing risk with free proofs of concept and flexible engagement models.
A part of fundraising and so on is part luck, part science. So Sure. I think that we do get lucky.
And you have some experience at it, which honestly can't hurt at all.
That's true. I I know what not to do at least. Right.
Exactly
Super important.
I wanna ask you two particular things. One is insurance intelligence. One of the early problems that many insure techs had, and we're talking, you know, ten years ago, eight years ago, even even sooner than that, was that you had a bunch of tech people like yourself
like yourselves come along and say, We're gonna answer these problems for insurance, but they didn't understand insurance. And by your own admission, that you're not a legacy insurance person, how are you dealing with And I'm sure you've discovered insurance has its own language, it has its own pace, it has its own aversion to risk. Which is kind of fundamental with insurance. Yeah. How are you dealing with that you're working in an industry that you're just learning about as we speak?
I would say two words, Rob. Humility and hunger. With the humility that we don't know insurance and there's a reason why things have been happening in a certain way for a certain number of years. So out of five things that possibly we feel that is wrong, there is a good reason for three things to be the way they are.
¶ Learning the Language of Insurance Why humility and curiosity are critical when building in a complex, relationship driven industry.
And maybe the remaining two is where we can contribute. So we just need to be consistently curious about the workflows, why they exist, the way they exist, and just be a great partner to the company that we are working with. Funny, like I have been learning a ton every day. Like WTF to me meant something different. It's like what the F. But it actually is Why a transfer fraud in insurance?
There you go. Yeah.
Like there's no boring day. I'm learning a lot on the insurance side. I'm learning a lot on deploying AI for insurance and doing it with a lot of humility. I'm not an expert in the room. I know AI, but even that is.
You're still a smaller team. Yeah. Have you hired an insurance professional?
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. About twenty percent of our team are with people who have been in insurance before. Uh-huh. That that's actually super important, Rob. we have experts who can test the workflows before it relates to production. They can bring in the insights and so on. That's also one very important thing in vertical AI. where you need to have domain experts in-house. So we definitely have that.
Yeah. Yeah. The other thing I want to ask you about is the pace at which you've grown. Which is really although I mean we haven't discussed financial numbers at all, but just from the pace of customer acquisition that has gone on. As I'm sure you've already discovered and experienced. Insurance people like to think about things for some time before they make a change. And they also don't like to mess with their processes and procedures because if something breaks
that could be a terrible, terrible consequence. Yep. And and so how is it that you've been able to gain the customers that you have so rapidly?
Yeah. There is also a principle in engineering, Rob, which says like if it's working, don't touch it. I understand that. Yes.
That very much the case.
Yeah. has worked for us so far. Uh this was actually contrary as well in many ways. Most companies in insurance who are selling to insurers Come to a conversation, they do a marketing presentation, maybe a demo of their product and so on. We felt that, yeah, that is okay, but still the entire risk is on the buyer side.
Mm.
That okay, if I adopt this, if it doesn't work, I get fired. Or like I'll just spend money and so on.
That's exactly what I'm saying.
Yeah. So we wanted to sort of reduce that risk and we to start thinking like an insurance company that okay, if I want to bet on further AI, I need to ensure this, this and this has happened. And we have made it extremely frictionless to make this, this and that happen. Like that involves one, can this product solve your problem? We actually run a free POC for that. We give opt out to our customers that if something does not work after even go live, it's on us. You are risk free on that.
three, we are not trying to sign a ten year contract with you. If you want three years, perfect, you get price protection and so on. So by very first principle thinking Rob that If I am in the shoes of a CIO buying a technology, what would I want to have? I wanna have less risk. I wanna have data security and compliance and predictability. And I wanna work with partners who would
be willing to show up. These are the constant principles of life like that in business that hasn't changed. People work with people uh they like and they can trust and then they can call on. That's what we are doing.
¶ Backing from Andreessen Horowitz The story behind securing one of the top venture firms and what it means for credibility and growth.
So can somebody repli I love it. Can somebody replicate this? Yes. Is it hard? Hell yes.
Very
It's very hard. One last question. I want to ask you about Andreessen Horowitz. So because of the podcast, Lee and I have been around the venture capital world and have some exposure to it. And one of the things that we know and understand is is that many times
we will have a founder on and he or she'll tell us about their experience and they'll name the company that has backed them or the lead who led the round. And it's frequently somebody that we might not know or we don't know well or we haven't heard of. You're the opposite. Andrezen Horowitz is arguably the premier VC company in the
Yeah.
And we've talked to people who have tried to receive funding from them and not been successful. And here we're talking to this guy sitting in a lawyer's office in San Francisco who didn't even know what to do with his product. Two years ago and you got the validation and it's a very important one from money aside, just the fact that you have their name is critical. Talk about that and tell us how that that happened.
Yeah, no, absolutely, Rob. Funny thing is the and recent round all got together in six days.
Goodness. So six days.
Days. Yeah. But even before any of that happened, we are in San Francisco. I was just pass passing by the N recent office on of the days. This was in May twenty twenty five. And the lights were on of the Andreson office the lights were on and so on. I was just passing by at about nine PM. I took a picture of that and sent it to my co founder that, bro, wouldn't it be nice if Andreessen does our CDZ?
Because it will bring a lot of credibility in insurance. They are a known name. We already have YC backing us, which gives us credibility on the tech circles, but NRECM will give us credibility in the insurance circles. And then Two and a half months later, that happened. So, in a way, it's an interesting so yeah. I still have the picture. If I get time, I can just shoot it to both of you as well.
That's awesome. I love that.
Now I think what in recent folks also saw and again Joe Schmidt who is our partner in recent has been a great partner. He's been phenomenal. He's sort of he's almost like Second partner to me in terms of like co founder. Works with us very closely. We are like sort of running together. He generates a ton of interest and is helping us become successful.
But yeah, I think as a founder, I'm grateful to have and recent as a partner, Rob. It brings a lot of credibility. They also have a really strong operating model as well. They have partners that can help founders in terms of like how to open a UK office. Things like that. So lots of wisdom in the team, which has helped us well a ton in the growth that we are seeing. Talking of numbers, we very early revenue hundred Q or so, the start of twenty twenty five.
¶ Final Thoughts: The Race Is On Aman reflects on building during a transformative moment in technology and what it takes to succeed.
We twenty X did last year. We tripled our revenue since and recent folks investors. They are happy as well.
Yeah.
So so far they feel that they have backed the right team. I want to ensure that continues to happen as well. And we build a company that goes public. I love it.
Something tells me we'll be talking to you again unless that IPO happens.
Yeah.
I know that a couple of the people on this have a hard stop, so we're gonna let you go. I have really enjoyed this and it's great to have you on, and congratulations on your success and how far you guys have come. Great story.
Appreciate it, Rob. This just I would say that's still very early days and we're ensuring that we work hard to ensure that we become a public company. And you mentioned about coming back here, so I'm thinking before I make this promise, but at least in a closed room before it's being recorded, I would love to share with you both when we decide to go public.
Sounds great to me.
We would love to present that. Thanks. Thanks. We'll take you up on that.
Sounds good.
Thanks so much for being on.
Thanks for having me.
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I could have talked with him for days.
For days.
And we almost did talk for days before even talking about his company. Yeah. What a great guest and what an exciting adventure that he is on. Yeah. And and to be on that team, to work in that organization, to work with him, that is awesome. That is awesome.
Be early.
Mm-hmm.
To be a pioneer, right? Because there'll be companies like his that come along 10 and 15 years from now, right? But to be there first. Or early. Very early. What a wonderful experience. And he's experienced and smart and humble and what a pleasure. We thank everybody for coming today, for being with us. And it's nice to be here with Lee and Israel too. And we'll say to you what we say every time.
Goodbye, everybody.
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