Pace raises $10M Series A from Sequoia to automate insurance back-office with AI agents

Summary

Pace, an AI operations platform for insurance, raised $10M Series A led by Sequoia Capital. Board additions include Brian Schrier and Lauren Reeder. The company automates back-office workflows such as new business intake, policy servicing, and claims processing using AI agents that navigate legacy systems including green-screen CLIs and desktop applications without APIs.

Founder and CEO Jamie Cuffe positions the opportunity in a $70 billion annual market for insurance back-office outsourcing. The broader financial services BPO market is $400 billion, roughly equivalent to the total enterprise software market.

How it works

Pace converts standard operating procedures into natural language agent operating procedures that run at scale. The platform processes tens of thousands of tasks monthly and handles workflows spanning many pages of complex insurance logic. Agents must reliably execute long, multi-step processes using document processing pipelines, voice calling, multimodal inputs, and integrations with systems that lack APIs.

The company deploys smaller models to parse documents and identify key sections, then larger models to synthesize answers. For form-filling and repetitive CRUD tasks across legacy applications, Pace has built reinforcement learning environments and fine-tuned agents, an approach showing early success as scaling laws compound.

Customer adoption and motion

Pace is live in production with major carriers such as Prudential, specialty mutual groups, and tech-forward brokers such as Newfront. The insurance market operates on trust and mission-critical scale, meaning early customers are large, established players rather than startups.

The company employs forward-deployed engineers embedded at customer sites who work directly with legacy systems and ship code back to the product. This dual role means integrations and bindings built for one customer become reusable components for the next. Some customers have progressed to building their own agents after Pace helped them launch the first one or two, reducing reliance on FTEs over time.

Cuffe used this model at his prior company, Retool, where he worked as a deployed engineer on financial services projects. The motion scales because the product itself grows more leveraged. Each FTE handles increasingly complex problems as the platform improves.

Speed and scale implications

Running agents 24/7/365 eliminates backlogs entirely. For new business, this accelerates quote-to-bind cycles and helps carriers win against competitors. Claims processing carries higher urgency. During hurricane season, backlogs can stretch for weeks or months, leaving claimants in temporary housing while awaiting resolution. Pace went live with one early customer just before hurricane season, positioning the agent as a hedge against seasonal demand spikes.