London-based Ancep, which builds AI agents for commercial insurance brokers, has raised $8.5m.
Creandum led the round, with Kleiner Perkins and Vicus Ventures participating.
Angel investors include Christa Davies, ex-CFO of Aon, and operators from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind.
Ancep was founded in 2026 by Gagan Khurana, its chief executive, and Jake Turner, its chief technology officer.
The pair met at Oxford and previously worked together at Scope AI, where Khurana ran sales and Turner ran engineering.
Ancep says revenue at Scope AI went from almost nothing to $2m in under a year, and that the company raised a $20m Series A from Index Ventures.
Ancep’s agents carry out the routine stages of a placement: reading the client’s submission, building the broker’s standard documents from it and approaching insurers for terms by email, portal or API.
They work inside the platforms brokers already run, including policy admin systems, e-trade portals and CRMs.
Ancep says this matters for the largest brokers, which often run dozens of policy systems side by side, and that it is the difference between a rollout measured in days and one measured in years.
The agents are live with ACIC Financial Advisory, which Ancep describes as one of the largest credit insurance brokers in Austria, a top 10 UK broker and the specialty lines of one of the top US brokers.
The chief operating officer of one customer division reports a 10% revenue increase within six weeks of going live.
Ancep says placing a risk takes roughly the same effort whether the commission is a few hundred pounds or tens of thousands, so brokers decline smaller work or leave it at the bottom of the queue.
It estimates that up to 30% of the risks a broker sees fall below that line and that about half could be placed profitably.
That, Ancep says, is 5-10% in revenue a large brokerage never books, which its agents help recover within a few weeks and without adding headcount.
Ancep says the broker stays in charge, as only an authorised broker can bind cover and the broking team reviews every agent output before it takes effect.
It says each client runs in its own isolated environment and nothing is pooled or trained on across brokerages without explicit consent.
Khurana said: “There have been enough vendors selling brokers time saved and cost reduced which just don’t resonate and get stuck in two year procurement cycles. What we sell is net new revenue.
“Plenty of people are betting brokers get disintermediated. We think the opposite: brokers have huge leverage, and no chatbot is going to replace it.”
Simon Schmincke, partner at Creandum, said: “Gagan and Jake built something that works within the systems those firms already run, meaning they are live and expanding across lines of business within weeks.”
Mamoon Hamid, partner at Kleiner Perkins, said: “Ancep is using AI to change that equation while keeping brokers at the centre.”
