Scout InsurTech Interview with Gaya

Gaya is an AI copilot for insurance. They seek to minimize repetitive manual data entry. Andrew Daniels sat with Co-Founder, Carl Ziadé, to learn more about how Gaya is impacting the industry.

Who are your clients?

Our clients are primarily insurance agencies, ranging from small "mom and pop" shops with under $5 million in premiums, to mid-sized firms with $10–30 million in premiums, all the way to brokers with billions in premium. The mid-sized ones are our favorite as they move fast, are process-oriented and let us work closely with their users to figure out how to improve on the product.  

Beyond brokers, we also serve underwriters at carriers, particularly during book rolls where carriers lack APIs. Gaya can significantly speed up manual processes. Similarly, wholesalers and anyone injecting information into carrier portals or systems are potential clients. Our sweet spot today is SMBs, especially brokers, CSRs and teams handling personal and small commercial lines where form entry is repetitive and portals dominate.

What does your product do?

Gaya is a browser extension that helps agents quote faster by enabling "super copy" and "super paste" functionality across carrier portals. It ingests any document—declaration pages, intake sheets, PDFs, even handwritten notes—and makes the data instantly available to paste into quoting carriers’ portals.

We work like a Zapier for websites with no APIs, helping insurance brokers and agents fill out forms more efficiently. Unlike existing tools like Hawklink that are limited to taking information out of Hawksoft and pasting in some of the input fields on the carrier portals, Gaya can extract information from anywhere and can fill forms intelligently by taking care of different formats and adapting when portals change.

We also integrate with tools like RiskAdvisor, SALT and Canopy Connect and support supercopying and superpasting in and out of the Agency Management Systems and Comparative Raters.

How much capital have you raised?

We've raised around 2 Million - more than half led by Independent Agency owners who have poured on average 25K checks in us back when we were still a design mock-up. 

Was the company born from within or outside the industry?

It was born from outside the industry. My co-founder and I started at Stanford with a car-sharing concept, which pivoted into car loan refinancing—where we discovered that dealers were making most of their profits through car financing, and insurance agents could help with refinance.

We built tech to minimize the number of clicks and form-filling insurance agents had to do to process a car loan refinancing. When that business failed, insurance agencies started asking for the scraped data back. That feedback led us to evolve the tech into Gaya: from a pure supercopier, into a superpaster.

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

We’ve grown by 10x over the past 12 months. 

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

The biggest challenge is the lack of standardization in the insurance industry. Everyone talks about the need for open APIs and standards, but progress has been elusive for over a decade.

Unlike payments, insurance is a "set it and forget it" industry—there’s little incentive for carriers to open up. Retention rates are 95%, so carriers prefer the status quo. Brokers would love APIs to reduce overhead, but carriers benefit from opacity.

That’s where LLMs (large language models) and Gaya come in—translating and transducing data from one format or standard to another without APIs.

How does Gaya take a unique approach to providing value?

Our uniqueness lies in two things:

1. 80/20 promise – We promise to fill 80% of the quoting form, leaving the rest to the agent. We often do 95 percent, but setting this realistic expectation ensures customer satisfaction.

2. LLM-powered RPA – Unlike legacy RPA tools that break when a UI changes, Gaya self-heals using LLMs. If a portal shifts a field, Gaya adapts.

   
   

Other RPA attempts failed due to fragility. Gaya delivers because we redefined the promise and backed it with modern AI that self-corrects.

What inspired the team to start this company?

My co-founder and I were driven by a shared ambition to build a big, enduring tech company.

Initially, we focused on car sharing and loan refinance. But through deep engagement with agents and insurance pros, we uncovered the quoting pain point and organically pivoted into insurance tech.

We ship fast—3 updates a week, 10+ improvements per release. We also aggressively sunset features that aren’t used. The guiding principle: "simple yet powerful."

Can you share any goal(s) for the next 12 months?

• Go out of beta for commercial lines like Commercial Trucking, BOP, Workers Comp and General Liability.

• Release our Web Agent product—a sort of AI-powered CSR that can log in to portals and perform actions (e.g., quote, add driver, change address).

• Integrate integrate integrate. There are so many broker-tech solutions that we need to integrate with. Now with our MCPs, these efforts will be reduced by 10x.

  
  

We're preparing for a world where humans and digital agents co-manage operations. It'll require changing mindsets, but we’re setting the right expectations and delivering on them.

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