Scout InsurTech Interview with ThreadWise

ThreadWise is an AI startup that reads the work already flowing through a P&C brokerage's inbox and turns it into reviewable, automated workflows, from certificate drafting to sales-to-service handoffs, freeing up licensed staff for higher-value work. Chris Luiz sat down with Co-Founder Liam Harreys to learn how ThreadWise is redefining operations for growing and acquisitive independent brokerages.

What does your product do?

"We're a single AI operating system for a P&C brokerage. One of our differentiators is our focus on email and the work that starts, passes through, or ends there. We started out as just an email co-pilot and have built a very robust, differentiated audit trail around email context.

What looks a little different about us versus the average insurtech is that, instead of coming in with a suite of tools and saying "here, buy these" and then just checking in quarterly, we come in and map all your workflows over the last 90 days and actually confirm any suspicions you might have had. If you say you need certificates, or an endorsement workflow, or a sales-to-service handoff, we confirm that with the data in your inboxes and call transcripts, and build a report based on the actual day-to-day work happening across your agency, so we make sure we're solving the right problem.

Broadly, the most common thing we do is a sales-to-service handoff automation that gives you a single source of truth for the work happening between your AMS, your point solutions, and your third-party vendors. That's the meat and potatoes of where we start, and it gives a great scalable foundation for all manner of workflows across the policy lifecycle. We have hundreds of templates across the policy lifecycle, and that library grows every day as we work with new partners and find new use cases.

In short, our differentiator is being an AI partner to an agency that keeps them up to date with the rapid pace of change, versus just selling one-size-fits-all off-the-shelf software that only ships quarterly updates."

How much capital have you raised?

"We've only raised one round, about a year and a half ago, but I don't want to share the number just yet since it isn't public. We're looking to potentially raise more in the future, only because we're very fortunate to have a growing user base that's seeing a measurable impact from our growing suite of solutions and want to bring that to more P&C risk advisors."

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

"While I haven't personally brokered or underwritten risk, I've worked in insurance services and insurtech for the better part of a decade. The impetus for starting Threadwise came from experience onboarding an insurtech in person at brokerages, because we didn't have AMS integrations yet. I saw how hard it was for people to learn new click paths, how fragmented the information really was in a brokerage, and what actually works in terms of the human relationships, both in the office and between producers, account managers, and their clients. So it came from within the insurance industry, even though I'm not a broker or underwriter myself. All our hires so far on the sales and operations side have been former commercial insurance brokers, which is nice. It keeps us focused on serving the specific independent P&C brokerage customer we serve."

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

"We're coming up on our fifth month of doubling ARR month over month. We're very fortunate to be in the position we're in, as well as to have the challenge ahead of continuing that trend."

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

"I think there are three challenges that compound for an independent P&C brokerage. One is external, one's a blend, one's internal. First, the risk landscape keeps growing, the surface area of possible risk for clients is expanding daily, personal or commercial, and that puts a lot of pressure on a risk advisor trying to keep up. Second, it's never been harder to find good service and account management talent, and the two most important levers in an agency are new business and retention. New business wins you net-new accounts, but if you don't retain it, it doesn't matter, and service is generally how you retain business. So when someone retires or leaves, and there's no one to pick up that work, that's scary for a lot of agency owners and their teams. Third, there's all this new technology, which is wonderful, and some of it can actually do what it promises, but I think people underestimate that change management isn't solved yet. In some ways it's easier than before, but in a lot of ways it's harder than ever, and how your specific agency should actually adopt these tools is still really unclear for a lot of folks."

How does Threadwise take a unique approach to providing value?

"We help across all three of those problems. For the risk landscape, before you can look at all the potential risks affecting a client, you need your data cleaned into one place, a clear source of truth across all your systems, so you can focus your time on being the best risk advisor you can be. With this single clear picture, you’re proactive in advising clients with all the data at your fingertips, not reactive to client requests and running between 8 systems to do 1 task.

For the talent and capacity constraint, we don't replace people; we replace tasks. A lot of what limits capacity for a team of five to ten account managers, we can take off their plate, removing the two to four tasks at the bottom of the job description that have been eating at them for a decade, whether that's routing tasks to the right person in the agency, reformatting an SOV nine different ways for different carriers, or pulling together information before a client or carrier meeting. That raises capacity so you don't need to fill a role that's been open for a year and a half; you can hire more strategically when you find the right person.

For the third piece, change management, one of the most famous phrases in insurance is "it depends." Two brokerages can look identical on paper- same revenue, same headcount, same book split, even operating in the same state or town- and have completely different operational challenges because of their specialty lines, their tech stack, how clean their data is, the experience of their leadership, and how much tech debt they're carrying. So we don't come in and sell you whatever seems to be your problem. We diagnose exactly what's keeping you from getting to the next level before we propose anything, whether that's a top-of-funnel process problem, a sales-to-service handoff problem, or just getting data clean enough to generate a cert. That's why we do the email report and the consultative engagement up front, to make sure we're not selling you something you don't need and that we're driving the highest possible ROI for you."

What inspired the team to start the company?

"I was at a previous insurtech, working at a brokerage where we were onboarding them manually because we didn't yet have an AMS integration. We were dragging and dropping policies, schedules, and endorsements one by one. More and more, I'd hear an account manager shouting across the office, 'Hey, can you forward me that thing from the contractor last week? Didn't you do an endorsement for him? Can you send me the most updated copy of that SOV?' And we realized: why are we trying to get into the AMS when all the data is sitting in email before it ever gets there? Of course, once we got in there, we saw how semantic, unstructured, and messy it was, but that wasn't a reason not to bring structure to it. We figured out our own way of chronologically mapping the relationships between internal and external stakeholders across email, which became a real unlock for activity tracking. If you understand how work has actually happened, you have the perfect foundation to bring impact to any part of the insurance lifecycle at a brokerage. That specific experience of seeing how poorly insurtech was being onboarded really shaped our initial thesis to build an email co-pilot, and it expanded rapidly from there."

Can you share any goals for the next 12 months?

"Continue the growth we've been very fortunate to have, and continue to see our impact play out with the earliest partners who've been with us since the start as well as with the growing number of brokerages joining us. Beyond that, it's really about continuing to learn from our partners to figure out the best ways to serve them. User feedback is extremely important to us, and we learn more from our partners every day, so another goal is staying cognizant of how we can continue to learn over the next 12 months while maintaining the growth trajectory we've built so far."

Scout InsurTech Thanks Its Partners