Scout InsurTech Interview with Force

Force is building the first AI-native insurance platform, bringing underwriting, claims, billing, reporting, origination and policyholder experiences together on one connected system, built around each carrier's own rules and workflows. Its modular design lets carriers start with a single problem or move their whole operation, with AI agents handling routine work in the background so teams can focus on decisions that need human judgment.  Andrew Daniels sat down with Chief Business Development Officer, Randy Shain to learn how Force is helping property and casualty carriers modernize their core systems with fully auditable AI, without the years-long timelines that have held the industry back.

Who are your clients?

“Our focus today is property and casualty (P&C) carriers, typically with annual written premiums ranging from roughly $50 million to $1 billion and up.”

What does your product do?

“Our agentic modules and microservices address carrier problems across the whole policy landscape, from underwriting and claims to policy administration, permissions, data security, governance, and more. I'll touch on those later as well. It is an AI-native system of record. What sets us apart is that the agents and the core systems live and work together on one unified data layer, and no one else has that. The tech is exceptional, and as I answer your other questions, I'll end up explaining why we've been able to do it.

Meanwhile, we're not naive. We understand that very few carriers, even small to mid-sized ones, are comfortable with a rip and replace. It's too difficult to get their heads around, and I understand that. It speaks to some of the industry's challenges, which we'll get to later. Because ripping and replacing legacy tech is so difficult, the microservices I referenced can be shipped separately. We go in, pick a problem and fix it. We can ship that to you very quickly. After that, you decide if and when you want to expand the relationship.”

How much capital have you raised?

“None. The company has been self-funded by the founders.”

Was the company born from within or outside of the industry?

“Within. One of the founders was, for five years, the youngest board member of a mid-sized P&C carrier that became our first client, and he was in his twenties at the time. The other founder has been a full-stack engineer for more than 20 years, and he's only in his late thirties. He was one of the first to build machine learning applications in the early 2010s. He doesn't like it when I say he's a genius, but he is. He just is. He also knows how to inspire other geniuses. We have a full roster of full-stack engineers, the kind of people who spend all day coding and then play video games at night. They're experts in that one way, and probably a little less so at everything else.”

What growth metrics have you accomplished over the last 12 months?

“Our marketing efforts really began in earnest in Q2 of this year. I was brought on in January, and the first three months were spent learning, because this is not native to me. I didn't know AI or insurance tech. So we've heavily indexed on technology and much less on marketing. For now, we're measuring our growth in conversations, like this one, rather than conversions. We're going to be getting more clients, but right now we're excited just to be having a lot of conversations.”

Within your domain, what is the current challenge that the industry is facing?

“There are a few, and I've alluded to a couple already. The first is that P&C carriers have spent years, maybe even decades, trying to use technology to cut their losses, eliminate manual handoffs and other inefficiencies, and improve their products without it taking years. The problem is that legacy tech keeps making promises that don't come true. Carriers spend a ton of money, years go by, and the latest fancy tool that looked good in a demo just doesn't work out of the box. I'm seeing this for myself: it's a steep climb to get a carrier to believe anyone in tech. When I say, ‘We can fix this,’ they respond, ‘Yeah, I've heard that before.’ I understand that, because they're not wrong. They have heard it before.

Add to that the fact that carriers operate in a heavily regulated industry, which means you need precise governance of every action taken by an AI agent. That's a recipe for frustration and being left behind, and that's where we come in.

The fourth challenge, which I think is huge, is that the existing platform vendors are gigantic but face what I'd call the innovator's dilemma. They're overwhelmed maintaining and updating scores of unique legacy core systems for existing clients, and they don't have a modern platform. You can't really modernize that foundation, and we're not sure how they can without spending a ton of money and time. I think of it like building a sandcastle and then adding thermal windows to it. Why would you think that would work? But if you're stuck there, what do you do? It's not that they're stupid at all. These are gigantic companies that have done something right for a long time. They just got started when code was written in a way that wasn't meant for AI. That's where we come in.”

How does Force take a unique approach to providing value?

“We decided, and by ‘we’ I mean the founders and the team they put together, to address those problems by building the foundation. Our foundation is AI-native from the first line of code. I'll run through six features that show that value.

First, we don't have bolt-ons. We're not acquiring other companies or bolting on technology. Our AI agents are embedded in the foundation we created.

Second, we have exceptionally engineered microservices and modules. Microservices aren't a new concept, but ours let us solve specific problems without forcing the rip and replace decision, because they're not a monolith dressed up as a microservice. They're the real thing. Our claims agent is a good example. Instead of a site visit, you can use a verified photo system. The agent projects the reserve from the policy terms and claim data, and it escalates situations above specific thresholds to senior adjusters. The biggest thing, which we learned when Adam, one of our founders, was on that carrier's board, is that our system automatically reserves for reinsurers when a claim crosses a certain threshold. The carrier was literally saying, ‘We don't know how much we're losing when someone forgets to hit the button to send a claim to reinsurance.’ My reaction was, ‘wait, what?’ But I get it. It's tricky.

Third, our data is isolated. Every carrier gets its own secure environment, so there's no cross-contamination.

That leads to the fourth differentiator, governance, which is extraordinary. If someone reading this takes anything from what I'm saying, I hope it's this: every AI action in our system is automatically logged, tracked, and auditable. That's not something you can fake, and you can't say it's sort of, kind of coming. It's already in our system. You can't have agents running around doing things without being able to see what they did, when, and why. This is what regulators will demand.

That leads right into the fifth, security and customizability. We have a patent-pending hybrid architecture that combines the security of a single-tenant environment, which I mentioned before, with the customizability of multi-tenant.

That's possible because of the sixth advantage, our deep configurations. They allow carriers to create new products, make changes, and so on, instead of waiting for us to change the code, which takes forever. The code sits in one place and the configurations for customization sit in another. So there's none of, ‘I asked you for this six months ago, where are you?’ followed by a year going by and, ‘Oh, we're working on it.’ That's not a thing with Force.”

What inspired the team to start the company?

“One of Force's co-founders was a board member of a regional insurance carrier for five years. He and his partner, our two founders, had already been running a property management company, and for years they'd been building software and automation to take costs out of that operation. The insurance company asked them to review their technology. In doing so, we realized that a better approach would be to start over from the ground up, with a modern foundation and modern architecture. We couldn't really fix what the carrier had, and trying wouldn't have been a good idea. That was the inspiration, and we've been building ever since.”

Can you share any goals for the next 12 months?

“We're looking to continue establishing ourselves as the most modern core system and agentic automation partner for P&C carriers. Within that, we look forward to bringing on new carrier clients, and we will. I'm very confident of that.

We're also continuing to add visibility and credibility through interviews just like this one. I have other conversations going, and I just presented at InsurTech New York. We're one of 50 companies selected, and we have five meetings and a five-minute pitch. We believe those kinds of opportunities will give us a boost, because when you're the newcomer, you need people to know you're legit and not some fly-by-night operation.

Finally, we're continuing to expand our agentic AI suite, which is happening all the time. We have seven agents developed now, all working and ready to go, and we'll keep adding more as time goes on.”

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