Nobody thinks about insurance until something goes wrong. That's sort of the point of it — it sits underneath everything, quietly holding up the real economy. Businesses can take risks because insurance absorbs the downside. Transactions close because someone is underwriting the exposure. It's infrastructure in the truest sense.
So you'd expect the systems running insurance to reflect that importance. They don't. Walk into most insurance operations and you'll find data re-keyed across systems that don't talk to each other, workflows held together by spreadsheets and email threads, critical knowledge locked in one person's head. People spend their days reformatting information instead of acting on it.
We started Bertie to close that gap.
I co-founded this company because insurance deserves foundational software, the kind that makes products easier to build and businesses easier to scale. Not a reskin. Not another point solution balanced on top of a broken stack. Real infrastructure — something that removes operational drag instead of quietly adding to it.
What drew me to insurance was the seriousness of it.
Insurance is hard for real reasons. The uncertainty is irreducible. The contracts are dense. The regulatory requirements are there because people's livelihoods are on the line. Software that serves this market can't just demo well — it has to fit how underwriters and operators actually work, day after day. It has to reduce risk rather than introduce it. Trust gets earned over months. I like that about this space. The difficulty is the filter.
The best software opportunities usually look like this: unglamorous on the surface, high-consequence underneath, with constraints that force you to build something that actually works. System quality compounds in environments like these. Insurance is the clearest case I've found.
The longer I've spent here, the clearer it's become that the real prize isn't speeding up any single workflow. It's improving the operating model itself. Every software category goes through this transition eventually — you digitise the visible tasks first, then you realise the deeper value is in the connective layer underneath, where data and decisions and operational logic actually meet. Insurance is still early in that shift.
And the cost of staying early is concrete. When rating, documentation, reporting, and admin all live in separate silos, you don't just lose efficiency — you lose control. Product teams get constrained by what the system can handle rather than what the market needs. Eventually the limitations of the infrastructure start capping the ambition of the business itself. I've watched it happen.
We're building Bertie to change that.
The ambition is simple. Software that helps insurance businesses operate with more clarity and less friction, built around how the market actually works instead of forcing it into a generic SaaS template. Serious operators should be able to move faster without giving up control.
Important industries deserve ambitious builders.
I keep coming back to this. Too much energy in tech chases whatever's fashionable, and too little goes toward industries that hold the economy together. The most enduring companies tend to get built in overlooked categories — the ones where the work is harder and the stakes are real. Insurance is one. When the infrastructure improves, everything downstream gets better: product launches move faster, operations run more reliably, good operators can grow with confidence instead of being held back by their own systems.
This matters even more now that AI is arriving. The meaningful gains from AI in insurance won't come from bolting a language model onto a weak system. They'll come from pairing strong foundational infrastructure with smarter ways to handle information and decisions. The underlying layer matters more when powerful new tools show up, not less. That's something I think about constantly.
Bertie's still early. We're building something we want people to trust because it's useful, not because we're loud. We want to improve the workflows that actually matter and help build a more modern operating model for insurance, with the seriousness that this category demands.
My job as co-founder isn't to make insurance sound exciting. It's to help make it work better. That's why I'm building Bertie.