Why We Invested: Slingshot Insurance
AI-native infrastructure for embedded insurance
Slingshot Insurance is an AI-native insurance company built for embedded insurance, which are the small policies that get sold inside someone else’s checkout, like coverage added when you register a kid for a soccer league.
Insurance carriers are the companies that back a policy with their own money and pay the claims. For most of the life of insurance, they built themselves around big, rare disasters, like a house fire or a flood. The growth today runs the opposite direction, toward small, everyday policies sold as part of a purchase online. A $25 policy at a sports registration page doesn’t work for a traditional carrier, because a traditional carrier’s cost structure needs multimillion-dollar programs just to break even.
Slingshot’s customers are MGAs, short for managing general agents: specialized agencies that build and sell insurance for a specific niche, like youth sports, events or gig work. An MGA today has two options for the carrier behind its policies. One is a traditional fronting carrier, a big legacy insurer that lends its license and its balance sheet but has little else to do with the product. The other is a tech platform with better software but no funds to back the policies, so the MGA still has to go find that backing somewhere else.
Slingshot is something new: AI-native infrastructure that gives MGAs the technology, capacity and speed to launch and scale embedded products, built from the ground up rather than software bolted onto an old system. Through its partnership with Skyward Group, MGAs get an A-rated carrier’s licenses and balance sheet from day one, and Slingshot’s own carrier is set to launch in the coming months. Below is a Q&A with Co-Founder and CEO Ethan Genteman.
1. Ethan, you spent years as both a chief actuary and data officer at established carriers. What did those roles teach you about the industry that led you to start Slingshot?
An insurance carrier, the company actually backing a policy with its own money, has two main responsibilities. The first is capital: have a balance sheet, have money in the bank and be able to write checks when a claim comes in. The second is operations: actually running the company well. Customer satisfaction, good data processes and working inside a highly regulated industry.
In my time at carriers, most of the focus went toward risk management and capital, the money side. Less went toward building an efficient operating company. That side had less of a playbook and a lot more open ground. I started Slingshot to serve the customers stuck on the losing end of that inefficiency and to build the technology that actually fixes it.
2. Slingshot is AI-native infrastructure built specifically for embedded insurance. What’s changed in the market that made a company like this necessary?
It wasn’t a single moment. It’s been a slow, gradual shift in how policies get distributed and how a customer goes from having a risk to having that risk covered.
Twenty or thirty years back, a policy got written because a customer had a risk and needed someone to cover it. Insurance contracts are often complex, so that customer needed an agent, and often more than one, to connect them all the way to a carrier willing to take on the risk. A retail agent might hand off to a wholesale agent, who hands off to a specialized MGA, who finally reaches a carrier. Even then the risk sometimes gets passed along again, to a reinsurer who insures the insurer.
Technology changed that. The last 15 to 20 years produced a boom in vertical SaaS, meaning software built for one specific industry, like a platform just for youth sports leagues or just for event ticketing. With that boom came distribution channels that never existed before. Embedding insurance directly inside those platforms, so the policy shows up right where the purchase already happens, is a fairly new concept, and it breaks the old model of routing a policy through multiple agents. That’s the gap Slingshot is built to close: infrastructure that lets an embedded channel place a policy directly.
There’s a second piece. A market opened up that never existed before: what we call the embedded micro-market. The legacy insurance market covers low-frequency, high-severity risk, meaning something that rarely happens but can be financially destructive when it does, like a house fire. The market an embedded channel serves is the opposite: high-frequency, low-severity risk, small things that happen often, like a cancelled youth soccer tournament or a piece of rented equipment breaking. Covering that kind of risk well takes a different kind of technology than covering a house fire does.
3. Slingshot pairs AI-native technology with the financial backing to stand behind policies. What can the MGAs you serve do now that they couldn’t before?
There are two sides to this. The end customer buying the policy, and the MGA building it.
Take the end customer. Say someone registers their kid on a platform like SportsEngine. Historically there was no way to protect that registration: injury risk, a cancelled tournament, a hockey rental, equipment that keeps getting more expensive. Buying coverage right at the point of registration simply wasn’t an option. You signed your kid up for the sport, and separately, on your own time, you had to call an insurance agent who knew nothing about the transaction and had to recollect all the information from scratch.
Embed the policy at the point of sale instead, and the platform already has what it needs to underwrite the risk (assess it and set a price) and offer coverage right there. Making someone go buy coverage separately never made sense from an efficiency standpoint. Now it’s a click of a button, tacked onto a bill you’re already paying.
Now take the MGA. These are the people who actually know how to build embedded insurance products, with the technology and the know-how to do it. What they don’t have, on their own, is a carrier that moves at their speed: the regulated balance sheet, the capacity (the financial ability to take on a given amount of risk), the ability to launch new coverages fast. That caps how many coverages an MGA can bring to market in a given stretch of time. This is still a young, high-growth market, and most products people buy online don’t have an insurance option attached to them yet. Right now only a small share of eligible products have any insurance option attached to them. Getting closer to full coverage across the market means the carrier has to move as fast as the MGA does, so customers end up with more options and MGAs get to offer them faster.
4. You’re partnering with Skyward Group, a publicly traded specialty insurance organization. What does that partnership make possible for Slingshot?
Insurance carriers are highly regulated, and different tiers of license cover different scopes of coverage. It also takes a track record, not just paperwork, to be allowed to sell everywhere: insurers earn a rating from agencies like AM Best, and it takes a minimum of five years in business just to qualify for the agency’s top tier, an A rating.
What Skyward gives Slingshot, starting day one, is access to an A rated carrier with real history in the market and the full breadth of licenses, letting Slingshot serve MGAs at full capacity instead of a partial one. In early Q1 of 2027, Slingshot’s own carrier will cover 48 states. It doesn’t yet have the years in business, the capital or the regulatory track record to offer everything itself. Skyward fills that gap, and for anything Slingshot can’t yet offer on its own while it’s still going through approval to get its own regulated carrier, Skyward can carry it in the meantime across all 50 states and Canada.
Skyward isn’t only a partner. It’s also a significant investor on Slingshot’s cap table, backing the business model enough to put its own capital behind it. This backing is validation from an industry leader that Slingshot is building something unique and extremely valuable.
5. A year from now, what does success look like for Slingshot?
We picked the embedded market on purpose. We project the P&C insurance market will grow from about $2.5 trillion to $3.7 trillion over the next decade. We estimate the embedded market will go from $70 billion to $750 billion over that same stretch.
That gap is our whole thesis. A market that’s barely moving pushes everyone to fight over their slice of a fixed pie, which is why the old fronting model, carriers and MGAs negotiating against each other over every dollar, exists in the first place. A market about to grow tenfold calls for something different. Instead of a negotiation, we’re building a formula where everyone understands upfront the value they bring and what they should get paid for it. Call it a club of MGAs, capacity providers and partners who want to win the post-AI era together, instead of nickel-and-dime each other. Moving fast as a group lowers costs for everyone and gives us a speed advantage the old model can’t match.
A year out, maybe eighteen months, success looks like a 50 state approved and rated Slingshot carrier and more MGAs and capacity providers onboarded to the platform. The collective model of partners who want to win together via the AI-native technology and infrastructure play is one that Slingshot is well positioned to bring to life.
