By: Pietro Decio
Tower Research Ventures is excited to announce the launch of Arvor, incubated in partnership with Gates Maus and team. Arvor is building an AI enabled insurance brokerage focused on the middle-market property and casualty (P&C) space. Gates has been in the P&C industry for over a decade, spending the vast majority of that time focused on the broker market. He joins after seven years at Attune Insurance, a broker-focused small commercial MGA where he led the product management function. Previously, Gates spent several years in consulting and product management at RMS (now Moody’s), and began his career as a P&C broker at WTW.
The commercial P&C insurance brokerage market is incredibly large and fragmented. There are ~122,000 insurance agencies and brokerages in the US, of which ~40,000 are independent and P&C-focused. In 2023, of the ~$857B in P&C insurance premiums written across the country, independent agencies/brokers accounted for ~62%. They were particularly dominant in the commercial insurance space ($416B in premiums, ~49% of the total), with 88% market share. According to the most recent study published by the Association for Independent Agents, 90% of independent agencies/brokerages generate less than $2M in yearly revenue.
At a high level, P&C insurance brokers perform four key functions for their customers: (i) identify the client’s risk profile, (ii) evaluate risk management approaches, (iii) secure and manage insurance coverage, and (iv) provide additional risk management consulting services. While brokers have seen significant disintermediation in the personal lines segment in recent decades – some of it driven by the growth in carrier DTC offerings, and some driven by technology companies such as Zebra – broker market share in commercial P&C has remained incredibly stable at ~85%-90%. We believe this is because middle-market (and above) commercial clients fundamentally value relationships with human brokers. They don’t just want to find the best policies for their needs – they want advice, service, and trust.
Today, however, most brokers are weighed down by tedious tasks that add little value to their client relationships – from chasing down client documentation to formatting and reformatting submissions for different carriers, organizing files solely for record-keeping purposes, and more. Most brokers operate with outdated, inflexible technology stacks, and struggle with complex integrations and poor user interfaces. This is true both on the front end (i.e. broker facing technology) and the back end (i.e. payments, servicing, etc.).
Arvor is aiming to change this. By building with AI-first technology at its core, Arvor aims to free up brokers to focus on what they do best: servicing clients and growing their business. Tower Research Ventures is excited to support this work, and we look forward to working with Gates and the Arvor team in the years to come.
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