i23 raises £4.9M seed to put AI agents inside insurance broking

i23, the AI-native insurance broking startup co-founded by former UK Treasury minister Bim Afolami, has raised a £4.9M seed round co-led by Four Cities Capital, with Outward VC, Seedcamp and Insiders Ventures also in.

£4.9M, oversubscribed, with a former minister as president

Sky News reported the round on October 28, and tech.eu followed on October 29. The seed comes to £4.9M, about $5.5M or roughly €5.85M at the October 29 xe.com rate, and is described as oversubscribed in UK trade coverage. Four Cities Capital co-led alongside a second lead that tech.eu says was not named. Outward VC, Seedcamp and Insiders Ventures took part.

Anand Sambasivan, co-founder of the retail investing platform PrimaryBid, is chief executive. Bim Afolami, economic secretary to the Treasury from 2023 to 2024 under Rishi Sunak, is president. Tech.eu adds two more names to the founding team: Mike Coombes, a former PrimaryBid COO, and Salman Valibeik, co-founder of the marketing startup Opriva.

The money goes into the AI platform. Sky News also reports, citing insiders, that i23 is expected to buy an existing insurance broker in the coming months. The coverage published so far gives no founding year, team size or city.

An operating model made of software agents

i23 describes its product as an agentic operating model for commercial insurance brokers, in which software agents take over the repetitive administration of broking while people keep the client conversation. In the Sky News report, Sambasivan puts the thesis in one line: “A bigger commercial insurance business is not automatically a better one.” He adds that “brokers serve clients better, and revenue can grow without admin work growing with it.”

Afolami told Sky News the aim is support for the person across the table: “Fundamentally that’s about supporting the human broker much more.” This is the first round on i23’s record in our database.

A fragmented £22bn UK market inside a global one growing 6.5% a year

UK insurance broking is worth up to £22bn a year and is highly fragmented, according to tech.eu’s reading of the Sky News report. Globally, Research and Markets (November 1, 2024) puts insurance brokerage at $244.0bn in 2023, rising to $379.9bn by 2030, a 6.5% CAGR. That is steady growth, and it tells a seed-stage company where the upside sits. With so many small brokers each carrying their own admin, the prize lies in the share a platform can consolidate.

Our own database gives a sense of scale. Konsileo raised €5.9M on October 7, with our records showing it led by Committed Capital and ACF Investors. Nettle closed a €4.3M seed on October 6 with Sure Valley Ventures in front. FRANK took €2.9M on October 1 from Armilar and Start Ventures. At roughly €5.85M, i23 sits level with Konsileo at the top of that group.

Four broker-automation rounds in one month

Those four rounds share one precise tag in our data, insurance broker automation, and together they add up to roughly €19M in October alone. October’s money points to the broker’s back office as the place investors expect change to land first, which is a useful signal for anyone building in the niche.

What to watch is the route each company takes. Konsileo’s headline was growing broking without acquisitions. i23 is reported to be heading the opposite way, buying a book and running its agents on it. That purchase will show whether the agent model holds its margins on a real client base, and the result will set the numbers the next broker-automation seed deck quotes. Watch for that first acquisition, and the whole fundraising data desk will be watching with you. Let’s keep building!