THE ESSENTIALS IN 30 SECONDS

  • i23 raised £4.9m ($5.5m) in an oversubscribed seed round co-led by Outward VC, Seedcamp, Insiders VC and Four Cities Capital, according to Sky News.
  • The start-up is building software agents meant to take over routine administrative work at insurance brokers.
  • i23 is expected to acquire an existing broker in the coming months; Bim Afolami will be president and Anand Sambasivan chief executive.

Bim Afolami, who served as economic secretary to the Treasury under Rishi Sunak, has raised £4.9m ($5.5m) for i23, a new start-up applying AI to insurance broking. Sky News first reported the seed round on 28 October, describing it as oversubscribed. Afolami co-founded the company with Anand Sambasivan, a co-founder of PrimaryBid, who is chief executive; Afolami will serve as president.

The round and the team

According to Sky News, Outward VC, Seedcamp and Insiders VC led the financing, with Four Cities Capital also co-leading. Tech.eu, which put the figure at nearly £5m, lists the same four investors and adds two more members of the founding team: Mike Coombes, formerly chief operating officer of PrimaryBid, and Salman Valibeik, co-founder of the marketing start-up Opriva. The sources do not say how the money will be used.

What i23 wants to build

The start-up describes its product as an agentic operating model, meaning a set of AI agents that take repetitive administrative tasks off brokers' hands, with the stated aim of also helping them generate more revenue. Beyond building the software, i23 is expected to buy an established insurance broker in the coming months and run it on this model, people familiar with the plans told Sky News. The company has not named a target or disclosed a timetable.

Sambasivan has argued that scale alone is not the goal. "A bigger commercial insurance business is not automatically a better one," he said, as quoted by Resultsense. The company's name combines "i" for intelligence with 23, the number of pairs of human chromosomes, which insiders told Sky reflects a view that technology should amplify human skill.

Context and open questions

Insurance broking is a large and fragmented market: Sky cites a global value of almost $700bn, while Tech.eu puts the UK broker market at up to £22bn a year. That fragmentation is what makes a buy-and-automate strategy attractive to start-ups, but it also raises practical hurdles. Acquiring a regulated broker means taking on its clients, staff and compliance obligations, and the round is modest relative to that ambition, as Resultsense points out. Whether AI agents can handle broking work reliably at scale, and how regulators will view it, remains to be shown once i23 has a live business.