Insurtech Gateway is delighted to be backing the team at Novee, building breakthrough infrastructure for the insurance industry. We’re proud to be partnering with Arved, Haris and Ehsan at the start of their journey, and believe they have the most ambitious attempt to streamline underwriting in commercial and specialty insurance.
The state of Underwriting
Underwriting still runs on unstructured documents, gut instinct and tribal knowledge. To set the scene, underwriting remains one of the most manual, judgment-based processes in insurance. Most submissions arrive as emails with unstructured documents, requiring experienced underwriters to sift through hundreds of pages to extract material facts. Risk prioritisation and assessment relies heavily on intuition, and triage rules are often hard-coded, inflexible and detached from real-time market dynamics.
Despite multiple waves of transformation, most solutions have focused on workflow tools and data extraction. None however have captured the nuanced decision-making of experienced underwriters.
Step in Novee, building an AI-native underwriting brain
From our first call, it was clear the team wanted to materially help underwriters assess risks, not just build flashy AI demos. Their early product already helps underwriters:
- Ingest submissions and extract key risk information
- Prioritise and pre-assess submissions based on underwriter-configurable criteria
- Analyse the submission against the criteria to provide a unified view of a risk
- Identify contextualised, nuanced risk signals that generic AI tools miss
- Automate manual tasks such as aggregation checks and contract comparison
- Provide pipeline and portfolio MI
Novee integrates directly into existing workbenches or email inboxes, which means no major IT overhauls – just faster underwriting, out of the box. Underwriters can configure preferences in natural language, and the platform dynamically provides risk scores, insights and suggested next actions. The team plans to extend far beyond productivity tooling, viewing this as a first step towards building a meaningful AI solution that improves the underwriting experience.
Remarkable team of market insiders
I reached out to Haris shortly following their pilot press release with Atrium, and their backgrounds immediately stood out.
Haris and Arved worked together at Deloitte, where they sold and delivered several AI-enabled underwriting transformations across the London Market. Arved also led key market data standards at Lloyd’s, and Haris previously founded an AI underwriting startup. Ehsan, brings deep AI engineering experience from Tractable and the BBC, having built large-scale insurance and consumer-facing platforms used by millions.
Together, they combine domain fluency, technical credibility and go-to-market experience in a way we rarely see at this stage.
Personalised AI agents for commercial & specialty underwriters
In the near term, Novee augments underwriters. Long term, they’re building personalised AI agents tailored to each underwriter’s risk logic, automating pre-assessment and manual tasks based on individual preferences and context. They’re starting with static lines like Terrorism, Property, and Energy.
Their roadmap includes self-learning systems, agentic workflows, and underwriting-AI collaboration loops. This approach could unlock massive gains in underwriting productivity and consistency, all without sacrificing control or expertise.
We’ve seen many startups try to replace underwriters entirely with AI, and Insurtech Gateway believes Novee’s approach is far more thoughtful and likely to succeed. Underwriters will instead become radically more efficient through their own personal AI agents.
Seed round and beyond
We’re thrilled to be investing in Novee’s £1.55m round alongside 42Cap, as they build the future of commercial and specialty underwriting. The team has just started, already securing meaningful deals post-investment. We’d be delighted to introduce any commercial and specialty insurers curious to learn more.
Welcome to the Gateway family Novee!
Get in touch
If you have an ambitious idea for a SaaS startup that can serve the insurance market we can give you funding and support. Check out our incubator and venture fund or get in touch.