Scout InsurTech Rising with Konduit

Denny Kuruvilla, Founder of Konduit, was interviewed by Andrew Daniels to discuss what’s fueling the specialty insurance and MGA boom, why newer MGAs struggle to access capacity through traditional channels, and how Konduit is building an open structured exchange to match MGAs with fronting paper and reinsurance capacity. Konduit’s platform is built on AI as core infrastructure, giving MGAs and capacity providers a future-proof structured way to evaluate and place programs faster.

Denny, specialty insurance is growing quickly in the US. What is driving the MGA boom and where are you seeing the most interesting opportunities?

“Risk is changing very fast. And if you look at traditional carriers, especially in the admitted lines, they struggle to build the products today for it very quickly, even as big as that risk is.

If you take excess and surplus, it used to be in 2000, around 3.6% of US P&C premium, and today it’s around 12%. And it’s almost 25% of commercial lines. Another stat, MGA premium hit $114 billion in 2024 — the fourth straight year of double-digit growth — and around $128 billion in 2025.

From an opportunity point of view, I would say you have classes today that never existed 10 years ago: cyber, credit risk, AI liability, climate-linked, embedded, and also there’s a huge growing catastrophe risk. That’s entered the non-admitted markets. It’s going to stay there for a long time.”

Why do smaller MGAs, particularly those below roughly $10 to $25 million in gross written premium, struggle to access capacity through the traditional channels?

“There are a couple of reasons, and they all compound each other.

As the risks are newer, there are a lot of innovative MGAs coming into the market. These are underwriters who have deep specialty experience, working in maybe reinsurance companies, wholesalers or carriers, who step out and want to create their own MGA. But it’s challenging to create a new MGA without a book and try to find capacity, because traditionally capacity wants to see your history, your loss runs, do some triangles on them, and then figure out if they want to back a book.

Broker economics is another factor. Typically, reinsurance brokers today that help you find paper or capacity want a level of brokerage that makes sense for them against their expense ratios. When you have a program that in its first two years is running less than $10 to $25 million in GWP, that doesn't cover the cost of servicing it - that's basic P&L math. The brokers we have spoken to would place programs at that size if the economics stacked up — today they don't, so that end of the market goes unserved.

Capacity also backs people and not the entities. Newer entities don’t have a track record, and teams have books, but those books are extremely hard to assess, especially when they belong to another entity.”

Konduit is building an open structured exchange between MGAs and capacity providers. How is that model different from the closed exchange environments already in the market?

“There are a few exchanges, and the good thing is they have been extremely successful in the market.

The challenge with some of the more closed, contained exchanges is there is capacity available and paper available, but there is a bit of trade-off in terms of autonomy; especially for innovation that’s happening in today’s risks.

Sometimes you may have to follow some of the underwriting guidelines to get on their paper or appetite. A lot of the MGAs I’m seeing today on Konduit’s platform succeed in recognizing and writing that risk because of the innovation they’re doing in their underwriting. That wouldn’t fit in some of the more contained exchanges that are there today.

Konduit is open, so any MGA can sign up, publish their program, and we find capacity is very keen to see it as is - not constrained by the fact that they cannot write it unless it conforms to certain principles around underwriting.”

What early traction and recent successes has Konduit seen since launching, and what do those results validate about the structured exchange?

“This has been the biggest validation for us: the momentum that we’ve had. We launched late April and are roughly a bit over four months live (as of Sept 2026). We have no marketing spend, and all of our traction has been inbound. We have 13 MGAs on the platform. That’s roughly one to two MGAs we evaluate on a weekly basis, and then they onboard onto our platform.

The most surprising part is that we are focused on the US market: the US specialty market, where our specialty lies, where the team wants to be, and where the growth is. But we are seeing MGAs coming from three continents. They’re on our platform because they’re looking for capacity either from Lloyd’s syndicates or from US specialty carriers.

From a capacity point of view, we have around five capacity seats across three institutions today, and we are in active negotiation with a few more. We have direct reinsurers, but also reinsurance brokers, that are interested to be on the platform at varying degrees of engagement right now.

From a placement point of view, every program that’s been published on Konduit today is in active placement. The negotiations are going on. That’s a good story for us because we know that this was needed, people are using it, and it’s doing what it needed to do: becoming an exchange where capital is being talked about faster, being placed faster.”

What does AI as infrastructure mean in practice at Konduit, and how has it changed the time and cost required to build and operate industry-ready insurance technology?

“That is probably core to why we’ve come to market so quickly and why we’ve pivoted on features and very core capabilities quickly to respond to needs.

There are a couple of ways you can do AI today. You can have AI running on top of infrastructure as a wrapper, doing things like chatbots, reading FAQs, answering things, and doing workflows.

What we call AI as infrastructure is in every way, from the ground up, the entire stack, the entire way that the software behaves with different parts of the software, all built on rails that are AI-supported. AI does a lot in terms of being at the critical places of the platform where you typically have a number to work out, a triangle to calculate, or a question to ask.

Importantly, it’s not open. It’s not a general-purpose model just running as a wrapper. It’s essentially targeted AI models that are vendor agnostic, working off a contained LLM or a data structure that helps you get better and better. For an MGA, you put a lot of your data into it, and in your own instance of Konduit, you are getting the best possible view of that data benchmarked against industry reference data — rate filings, industry studies, standards and benchmarks — not against any other MGA’s or capacity provider’s data.

The whole stack was built once AI was released, and it’s built to make it future-proof for anything that happens in AI.”

Looking forward, what still needs to be solved in specialty insurance capacity placement?

“If you look at the value chain, capacity starts it off with finding capital to deploy. At some point, MGAs come in with programs and they talk to capacity. The last piece is the MGA actually running the business: deploying the capacity, getting premiums, and doing their bordereaux.

What’s post-bind is once capacity and an MGA say, ‘Okay, we’re good to go. We’re going to back you. We’re going to give you paper, or make an excess-of-loss or quota-share reinsurance commitment’ – once that’s done, capacity needs to figure out: how is this really doing from a performance point of view? What are the claims accumulating or outstanding? What are you running against my book?

That is being solved today by a ton of companies that do bordereaux cleansing, reporting back, reconciliation, and commission reconciliation.

We will get there. We need to get there. But right now, we’re solving what’s not solved in the market: the matching piece, by being an exchange.

The other side is treaty creation. Today, capacity comes with treaties already done and they want to deploy. But sometimes they’re seeing all these risks on Konduit and thinking, ‘I need to create something to deploy here.’ That’s the other side of it that we will take on as time goes.”

Konduit Capacity Inc. is a technology and information service. Not an insurance or reinsurance broker. Provides no capacity. Handles no premium or client money. Provides no underwriting, placement, coverage or regulatory advice.