By James Thaler

June 3 - (The Insurer) - Equal Ventures partners Adam Chadroff and Rick Zullo are seeking “really big opportunities" that can reinvent the insurance industry, as the "thesis-driven" firm deploys $250 million in committed capital.

Zullo told The Insurer TV that Equal Ventures is focused on “big swings” that go beyond investing in firms that are simply focused on delivering incremental tools.

“We're looking for founders who are ready to take those big swings and have the intensity and the drive and the experience,” Chadroff added on the sidelines of last month’s inaugural Equal Ventures Insurance Capital Summit, which he said aimed to bring “connectivity” across various segments of the industry.

“We look for specific areas where we think there's going to be a secular shift in favor of a particular opportunity, or categories that we think haven't received enough funding, or that we expect to become more interesting,” Chadroff added.

Equal Ventures, which has been around for about six years, is focused on bringing "connections and conviction to founders at the earliest stage" through seed stage investments across insurance, energy, retail and supply chain, said Zullo, who is the firm's founder and managing partner.

"We want to be in category leaders,” Zullo said, pointing to Equal’s investment in ThreeFlow, which he said is “reinvent(ing)” employee benefits and the new E&S, high-value homeowners startup Stand, led by former Metromile CEO Dan Preston, who Zullo said is “attacking the hardest and most difficult climatic risk with insurance."

“We don't want to be in $100 million companies. We want to be in the companies that become the next Ryan Specialty, the next Acrisure, and the next Vertafore, (or) Guidewire,” Zullo added.

INSURTECH EXCITEMENT

Chadroff called the opportunity to deploy AI in insurance “immense,” adding that people had "discovered the addressability of vertical AI applications in this industry.”

“There's a lot of deserved excitement about the opportunity to be more efficient across various parts of the value chain and insurance," he added.

Zullo’s past investments include auto insurtech Clearcover and Riskmatch, while Equal has invested in rental insurance provider vQuip and insurance workflow automation insurtech 9root.

Chadroff previously worked at insurtech startups Policygenius and Counterpart, with the duo having worked in the segment for about a decade.

“The atmosphere of what VC investing in insurance was very small back then, it was either you were a SaaS company or DTC insurer, and that was pretty much all you could get away with,” Zullo said.

“Now, we have companies that are full stack carriers.”

“We have excess and specialty, we have program managers, we have software companies. We have AI companies. We have platforms, aggregator platforms ... The surface area is just so much bigger now that we can leverage AI and technology to invest in really amazing companies. You look at the biggest shareholder value stories over the last fifteen years, it's not a venture backed startup,” Zullo said.

“It's Ryan (Specialty), it's Acrisure, it's these folks who leverage technology and innovative business models to go attack their sectors and build something truly iconic,” said Zullo.

“That's what we're after, not to just invest in software for the sake of software, and I think AI has opened the door on a lot of that, and we're excited about that. But at the end of the day, we're just investing in great businesses, and that's really the objective of the game,” he added.

After a spell where high capital costs led to a downturn in insurtech funding, and tech funding more broadly, Chadroff said he’s seeing “a lot of excitement” among investors in insurance, with more capital returning.

“And there's a lot of new folks who are getting excited about the size of the category and the opportunities,” he said.

“I think when you can showcase a big enough opportunity, there's a lot of investment interest,” Zullo added.

Watch the full interview with Equal Venture Partners’ Rick Zullo and Adam Chadroff to hear more on:

• How Equal Ventures is focused on “really big opportunities that can reinvent the industry”

• The firm’s strategy bridging a digital divide by partnering with incumbents and innovators

• How “surface area” for insurtech investing universe has expanded to include E&S, MGAs, aggregator platform, and AI software businesses

• Inaugural Insurance Capital Summit aim to build “connectivity” within industry

• And more…