Pace, a New York-based AI operations startup for insurers, closed a $46 million Series B co-led by Thrive Capital and Sequoia Capital on May 27, valuing the 28-person company at $375 million. Emergence Capital and Pruven Capital also participated. The round funds expansion to “tens of millions of operational tasks” across the US, Europe, and additional markets, according to Forbes.
Pace deploys autonomous AI agents to handle insurance back-office work: submission intake, policy servicing, claims handling, and data entry. The agents navigate legacy portals, reason across documents, and make phone calls. Since launch, they have autonomously completed more than 250,000 insurance workflows for clients including Prudential Financial, WTW, Newfront, and Convex, according to Pulse2.
The Florida Storm Test
The operational proof point came during a major storm in Florida. Ryze Claim Solutions, a Pace customer, faced thousands of new claims in a single week. Instead of scrambling for temporary claims processors, Pace’s agents handled the surge.
“We were able to process thousands of claims immediately,” CEO Jamie Cuffe, 29, told Forbes. “Instead of having a backlog, they had zero backlog.” The agents processed claims with over 99% accuracy, according to Cuffe.
At Prudential, Pace automates thousands of hours tied to policy servicing and customer acquisition. The partnership with Ryze accelerates claim cycle times by 30%, according to the company’s announcement.
Legacy Systems as the Catalyst
Insurance runs on archaic infrastructure: portals, faxes, PDFs, phone trees. Building custom APIs for each system is logistically impossible. Pace’s agents use computer-use capabilities to navigate these non-API systems end-to-end, mimicking human behavior to click through interfaces.
“Our evaluation success rates for navigating legacy interfaces shot up from 30% to over 95% pretty much in the course of one model release at the beginning of this year,” Cuffe told Forbes. In some cases, Pace agents autonomously resolve 90% of policy servicing cases over email and voice.
Sequoia partner Lauren Reeder framed the timing in sector terms: “In different verticals, once the models are good enough to do maybe 50, 60, 70% of a task, the whole vertical very quickly switches and starts to adopt AI very quickly,” she told Forbes. “We saw this first in legal, and then we saw this in customer support. And then we see insurance as this next wave.”
The Offshore Replacement Thesis
Insurance accounts for over 11.8% of US GDP, and roughly 25 cents of every premium dollar goes to administrative processing, according to Forbes. Historically, carriers reduced that overhead by outsourcing to massive offshore operations in India and the Philippines, run by firms like Cognizant and Wipro.
Pace’s bet is that the next labor pool is virtual and elastic, not offshore. Thrive Capital partner Philip Clark put it bluntly: “Pace does the exact same thing for knowledge work in insurance that AWS did for cloud computing. If a severe weather event hits, a carrier can instantly spin up a thousand virtual, highly trained intelligent workers for a day to handle the influx, and then scale them back down when the sun comes out,” he told Forbes.
Regulated Industry Adoption at Scale
The $375 million valuation for a 28-person company signals how investors are pricing agentic AI in regulated verticals. Insurance, with its compliance requirements, audit trails, and risk-averse culture, has traditionally been a lagging technology adopter. Pace’s customer list (Prudential, WTW, Convex) and workflow volume (250,000+ completed) suggest that resistance is breaking down when the economics are clear enough.
Cuffe framed the mission in market-structure terms: “Closing the $9 trillion protection gap starts with AI-native operations,” he said in the company’s announcement. The gap between insurance coverage that is economically necessary and coverage actually purchased represents a market failure driven partly by administrative costs that agents can compress.