Pace raises $46M from Sequoia and Thrive to bring AI agents to the insurance industry

Insurance has long been one of the biggest targets for AI automation. The industry still runs on mountains of paperwork, manual data entry, phone calls, policy reviews, and claims processing that can take days or weeks to complete. Investors are now pouring money into startups trying to rebuild those workflows with AI agents.

One of the latest bets comes from Pace, a startup building AI agents for insurers. The company announced Tuesday it has raised $46 million in Series B funding co-led by Thrive Capital and Sequoia Capital, with participation from Emergence Capital and Pruven Capital.

Pace works with insurers and brokers including Prudential, WTW, The Mutual Group, and Newfront. The startup says its AI agents have already completed more than 250,000 insurance workflows since launching last year.

“At Pace, we are on a mission to insure more of the world’s risk,” said Jamie Cuffe, founder and CEO of Pace. “Closing the $9 trillion protection gap starts with AI-native operations and Pace agents are purpose-built for that work.”

With $46M in funding from Sequoia and Thrive, AI startup Pace aims  to transform insurance workflows

The company’s pitch is straightforward. Insurance firms still depend heavily on back-office workers to process submissions, service policies, handle claims, ingest documents, and move information between disconnected systems. Pace wants AI agents to take over much of that repetitive work.

Its software can move through internal applications, read documents, reason across data, and even place phone calls to complete operational tasks that previously required human staff.

That approach is gaining traction across the insurance sector, where companies are under pressure to reduce costs without slowing customer response times. Pace says its systems are already automating thousands of hours of manual work for Prudential across policy servicing and issuance workflows tied to customer acquisition.

The company says its partnership with Ryze Claim Solutions has reduced claim cycle times by 30%, and its deployment at Convex US speeds up data ingestion for renewals and new business processing.

Pace plans to use the new funding to scale what it calls an “agentic workforce” capable of handling tens of millions of operational tasks this year across the United States, Europe, and other global markets.

“At Thrive, there are two things that really matter to us when investing in a company: ideas whose time has come and people who are really well matched to the problems they’re working on,” said Philip Clark, partner at Thrive Capital. “We are in this really special moment where the most important high-value parts of the knowledge economy are being augmented and automated to a significant degree by these models, and Jamie is one of those people where you go in biased to saying yes.”

Large insurers appear increasingly open to experimenting with AI systems that can plug directly into day-to-day operations rather than serving as simple chatbots or customer service assistants.

“We’re delighted to be partnering with Pace,” said Terry Garrett, Head of Strategy and Operators, Risk & Brokering at WTW. “Our collaboration brings together shared ambition, complementary strengths, and a real commitment to doing things better – for our clients, colleagues, and the wider industry. This partnership will make a meaningful difference to our business model over the long term.”

The funding comes as investors continue to back startups building AI agents for enterprise work. Insurance has emerged as one of the biggest early markets for that shift. The industry generates huge amounts of structured and unstructured data, runs on repetitive workflows, and still relies on many processes built decades before modern AI systems existed.

Pace is betting that insurers are finally ready to hand more of those operations to software.