Scout InsurTech Interview with DealSurface

DealSurface is an insurance-focused GTM solution that builds and deploys sales pipelines that accelerate deal cycles. By surfacing product-specific opportunities across the entire industry with insurance-specific data, DealSurface gets you to the right companies and buyers faster. Chris Luiz sat down with cofounder Ben Seitz-Sitek to learn how DealSurface is redefining how vendors sell into the insurance space.

Who are your clients?

"We work with vendors selling into the insurance industry, especially those selling to carriers. The best fit tends to be teams at an inflection point: those doing founder-led sales, scaling their go-to-market efforts, expanding into new verticals, launching new products, or raising funds."

What does your product do?

"DealSurface generates ranked, product-specific sales pipelines in minutes. We identify which prospects to engage and why, along with the buying committees and stakeholders relevant to your specific solution. Every sales pipeline is backed by evidence from authoritative sources, including statutory filings, earnings calls, press releases, ratings agencies, trade publications, and conference talks from our data asset. Our data has been used to back fundraising efforts, make inroads into carriers, and build marketing campaigns."

How much capital have you raised?

"We are bootstrapped and funded by our customers and projects. Self-funding enables us to focus deeply on insurance without the pressure of expanding horizontally."

Was the company born from within or outside the industry?

"From within. We’re a two-person founding team who previously led Product and Partnerships at an insurtech providing commercial underwriting data and casualty fraud mitigation tools to the top 50 P&C carriers. We experienced firsthand the long sales cycles and painful buying by committee – and we saw how poorly other go-to-market tools served this industry. So after experimenting with early beta testers, we formally launched DealSurface in May 2026 to help revenue teams get to 'yes' faster."

What growth milestones have you achieved over the last 12 months?

"We’re four months in and have two paying customers. To date, our customers have added more than $1 million in net-new qualified opportunities to their sales pipelines and cut down on months of research time. As part of our initial product buildout process, we also conducted more than 100 conversations with insurtech revenue leaders about the shortcomings of tooling in the space."

Within your domain, what are the current challenges facing the industry?

"I see two primary challenges in the insurtech GTM space. First, horizontal sales tools fail in insurance because they lack the features and data needed to help vendors find the right companies and the right people at those companies. Oftentimes, the entire industry is lumped into one 'insurance' category, and the filters available for segmenting down don’t apply. There are more than 3,000 U.S. carriers writing more than 150 lines of business across 50 distinct state markets. That’s not to mention agencies, brokers, MGAs, and reinsurers. It's an extremely complicated market and therefore hard to model."

Second, insurance is a relationship-heavy industry. Selling to carriers is a blend of art and science. Generic outreach and badge scans don’t work – you need relationships and information. We provide a holistic view of the market as it relates to your solution so you can focus on which relationships to invest in and what those clients actually care about; we’ve found that this focus is especially critical in the age of AI outreach and vendor saturation."

How does DealSurface take a unique approach to providing value?

"Vendor solutions are becoming more modular. A solution dealing with SMB underwriting, for example, might be composed of four 'modules' – let’s say segmentation, risk classification, book review, and submission intake. The way that each aspect is pitched, the stakeholders involved, and the market appetite are different for each. It currently takes months to uncover the relevant information and build an approach for one solution at one carrier… let alone multiple products across the entire market. 

Our customers specify a 'product', which is something that solves a series of pain points for a given customer profile. Our system breaks down each product into topics and a target segment to match evidence against. The result is product-specific intelligence and strategies about which carriers to approach, who to speak to, and what message to deliver. Our favorite part of our demo is when we show a client a prospect they know well, and we replicate in 5 minutes what took them three months of conversations to learn. Because we deliver this experience across the entire market at once, we often surface prospects that you didn’t even consider or know existed. It’s the fastest path to finding the right companies and right people to engage with. 

The makeup of your sales pipeline also impacts everything from financial forecasting to hiring to marketing spend. Your pipeline must be 'defensible' – with close probabilities and timelines based on evidence. By building your sales pipeline on evidence of product-market fit, you can feel more confident in your planning, and of course shorten deal cycles and grow revenue faster."

What inspired the team to start this company?

"Like most companies, DealSurface was born out of a combination of frustration, curiosity, and timing. 

We have a genuine curiosity about the insurance market. We really enjoy modeling the companies, the relationships, and where to find evidence of product fit in this rapidly evolving industry. For example, I just spent hours going down a rabbit hole about cat bonds and how they stabilize the reinsurance market – fascinating stuff.

In terms of timing, we’re at a unique time where the speed and cost of building enable us to build really specialized data and tooling for this underserved industry; we love that we can quickly solve our customers’ GTM problems and help them grow their businesses."

Can you share any goals over the next 12 months?

"We want to become the default GTM intelligence tool for the insurance space by expanding how we are used in RevOps, marketing, and selling efforts. More concretely, our goal is to sign 30 clients and expand the depth of our coverage of other insurance entities like agencies, brokers, MGAs, and reinsurers."

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