Insurtech Startups Apply AI to Back-Office Woes

The BrokerTech Ventures 2025 Accelerator startups are putting artificial intelligence to work in new ways, rethinking back-office processes from telephony support to employee offboarding, says Accelerator Executive Director John Jackovin.

Talking to Leader’s Edge on the eve of the multiday, in-person BTV Mania, Jackovin shares insights on new areas of startup focus, investment trends, and what BTV startups and partners have to look forward to when they gather this week.  

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Disclaimer: Podcast transcriptions are computer generated, please excuse errors. For the most accurate version of the conversation, please refer to audio.

John Jackovin: You had these inflated values for companies that hadn’t done anything yet. I think the correction that happened – and I’d call it a correction between 22 and 23, you started seeing maybe more logical valuations based on where they are.

Sandy Laycox: Welcome to the Leader’s Edge podcast. I’m Sandy Laycox, Editor in Chief of Leaders Edge. In this podcast sponsored by BrokerTech Ventures, I talk with John Jackovin, Executive director of the BrokerTech Ventures Accelerator. Having recently welcomed the 2025 cohort into the accelerator, John gives us a sense of the technology and focus areas of this new group.

John Jackovin: It’s really interesting every year you start seeing these patterns emerge. About two years ago we started seeing AI become pretty pervasive when it comes to startups. We go back to 2020, we started seeing a lot of like back office stuff, then that fell off, there was a lot of like employee benefits, companies offering unique ways to engage and incentivize employees. That has dropped off. With what happened with OpenAI, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Deep Seek, all of these AI platforms that have come out, we’re starting to see companies rethink back office technology, leveraging AI to make things more efficient. Where before it was a lot of manual intervention, how AI can streamline some things.

Believe it or not, we have a very AI focused cohort this year — not necessarily everybody working in the same area, working in different areas and using AI differently. Whether it’s kind of an AI robotic process automation mashup to those that are using AI to automate telephony support. People call in and being able to retrieve information about policies and deductibles.

How much companies co pays are. It’s just really interesting how and where the startups are fitting in when it comes to AI. Overarching theme would be artificial intelligence for 2025.

Sandy Laycox: Yes, all the way. Well that’s definitely not unexpected, but really interesting to see how the trends and shifts in both the insurance marketplace and in the broker workplace translate into what you all are seeing in your accelerator. Very exciting to hear. I’m sure there’ll be many folks interested to see these technologies and how they can come into play in the back office. Any standouts in particular? Any particular focus areas that are unique to you this year?

John Jackovin: One that really resonates, I remember being introduced to them probably a few months before the applications were open. It was a thing that I had never really heard before or even gave much consideration to, but it was a company that focuses on employee offboarding. If you think of the life cycle of an employee with a company, there’s a lot of focus on hiring and onboarding and getting them up and running and then employee benefits to keep them. There’s the — except for a select few people — well, I guess everybody’s eventually going to be offboarded in some capacity. They’re focused on that.

When you give your two weeks’ notice to the point in time where you’re not technically engaged with that company, how do you make that process as simple and streamlined and beneficial for that former employee as possible? Including extending health care, which everybody thinks of COBRA from a healthcare extension. But there’s ways to maybe give a better plan to the employee at less cost, but also less cost to the employer.

It’s really interesting because there is a certain cohort of former employees that become employees again — where they were at a company, then they go, they do something else and they come back.
How do you engage that employee or former employee so that their experience not only during their tenure with you was good, but also then as they transition to a new job? It’s again one that I hadn’t heard of before. We hadn’t seen in the last five cohorts. One that definitely stuck out in my mind.

Sandy Laycox: Then we get into BTV Mania, which is currently happening on site in Des Moines. John shares the history of the event, which gathers together startups and the BTV partners, including retail brokers, wholesalers and carriers, for multiple days of brainstorming and collaboration.

John Jackovin: Yeah, what is BTV Mania? It was an idea that we came up with probably three or four years ago. It’s tough to remember exactly, but it was on because the first couple years we had to deal with the pandemic, right? We learned a lot, we were forced to try different things. What we realized is that having this really high concentration of meetings, engagement, social events, networking over the course of a few days was really important to foster that relationship a little bit deeper than what can traditionally happen when we’re forced to do everything virtually.
It’s a few days that’s kicking off essentially now where we bring all of our partners together with all of our startups. Like I said, it is a very high concentration, start in the morning and late in the evening of meetings, roundtable discussions, networking, social events.

All things to foster a deeper relationship between our partners and our startups. What’s really cool is that we have built in some time for our partners to get together and discuss topics and things that they’re going through, which is very unique and hard to coordinate — 25 companies coming together and talking about specific topics.
It really ends up being super beneficial for the startups who are looking to implement and to drive as many proofs to concept, pilots, customer engagements. Also really helpful on our partner side because obviously they get a deeper dive into the startup mindset, but also have this opportunity to engage with their fellow partners to talk through some of the topics that they may not be able to do or talk through outside of BTV Mania. We call it BTV Mania because it is a pretty crazy time for all of us. It has proven to be probably the best bang for your buck when it comes to just engagement between partners and startups.

Sandy Laycox: Yeah, I mean it sounds like just a safe space to really talk through the technology and the challenges and make some progress for the industry.

John Jackovin: Yeah, most definitely.

Sandy Laycox: Yeah. You guys have been doing this for a few years now. Any lessons learned in the past or things that you’re focused on this year that you want to see come out of it?

John Jackovin: One of the things that we tried last year that turned out to be really beneficial is something that I mentioned just previously. But historically we had done all of these engagements between startups and partners and they would get together. Last year we had the benefit because we had actually accepted two fewer startups than in previous years. We had this hour and 15 minutes that weren’t sure how we were going to fill. Some of the feedback that we had gotten from previous events was it sure would be nice for us as a group to get together and talk through topics and trends and issues and these sorts of things.

We created this at the end of the day, like 3:00 or around 4, 4:15, 4:30 — you can’t get too late in the day otherwise people zone. Ultimately we bring everybody together. All of our partners together and we crowdsource topics. Then we have leaders within the partner group kind of lead the conversation around these topics.

We got the best feedback — just to be able to just have that kind of, as you mentioned, safe space where they’re able to talk through these topics. Everybody kind of lives in their own silo, right, within an organization, and they hear the same thing from the same people.
Now they have this opportunity to kind of break free from that and get other perspectives — whether it’s broker to carrier or wholesaler, carrier to broker, broker to broker, or carrier to carrier. It just provides this really unique opportunity which has been beneficial. This year we’re going to continue that, which is great.
We’re also doing something that I’ve coined “Pre-TV Mania” because it happens before BTV Mania. One of the things that I’ve been struggling with over the last few years is: how do we keep engagement between our partners and our startups?

We don’t have a lot of time and we can’t create individual events that are these one-off events because it’s time, it’s capital, it’s these sorts of things.
We’re like, well, everybody gets in the day before BTV Mania. What could we do to maybe bring back some of our alumni startups? For these people that are there on the 8th of April when it’s happening — how do we create that engagement between those startups and those partners? Things change with startups. They change very frequently and very fast. How do we do that?

We came up with this idea of the day before BTV Mania. Bringing together our partners that are in town already for BTV Mania with our startups who really want that continued engagement. We’re trying that. It’s an experiment this year and we hope that it provides an opportunity for continued engagement between our partners and those startups, but also partners that weren’t involved when certain startups went through. I mean if you think about it, back in 2020 we had seven brokers and that has changed dramatically between 2020 and 2025.

Sandy Laycox: Finally, John shares his perspective on overall Insurtech trends, including investment trends and areas of focus for startups.

John Jackovin: Investment in this space — and I think investment overall — has been crazy the last — if you just take in kind of time box 2020 to 2025 it’s been absolutely absurd. You had 2020 to 2022 where the valuations of companies were just skyrocketing which is crazy. Quite honestly, there was a lot of capital being put in for conceptual ideas. I think that honestly that — my take on it — ultimately hurts everybody because you raise $20 million on $120 million post-money valuation or something like that and you have a product but maybe you don’t have product-market fit. They expect you to do a lot with that $20 million. If you’re already behind where they conceptually in their head think you should be, it takes a long time, it takes a lot of money to catch up. You had these inflated values for companies that hadn’t done anything yet. I think the correction that happened — and I’d call it a correction between 22 and 23 — you started seeing maybe more logical valuations based on where they are.

You also started seeing VCs really focus on revenue and how they were burning capital versus, hey, you have $10 million in the bank, you need to be — this needs to last you for 18 months — so you can do the math on how much you need to burn every month, which is not a great way of approaching it. But more how do you get to revenue, how do you get to profitability, those sorts of things.
I think we’re in a good spot when it comes to insurance and Insurtech funding. You’re starting to see some exits happen, which is a good thing I would say.

Kind of an overarching theme that I’m seeing is a reduction in repetitive tasks. Sometimes it’s hard because there’s a lot of manual intervention and things that happen in insurance and moving data from here to here to here and then back — that happens. I think what you’re going to start seeing is a focus on eliminating repetitive non-value-added tasks. I think it’s going to have a huge impact. That could be just daily tasks that people do, the way that data flows from carriers to brokers and brokers to carriers.
I think you’re going to start seeing ways to make insurance a much more efficient ecosystem, as opposed to a bunch of disparate companies that are just focused solely on themselves and come together and focus more on the ecosystem. I think there’s huge benefits from efficiency, there’s cost benefits, and ultimately that just flows down to the customer and their engagement and perception with insurance.

Sandy Laycox: That was John Jacobin, executive director of the BTV accelerator, talking to us on the eve of BTV Mania. I hope you enjoyed our conversation. For more podcasts with BTV and a whole host of others, go to leadersedge.com or subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.