Ancep raises USD $8.5 million to boost broker revenue

Ancep has raised USD $8.5 million in a funding round led by Creandum, with participation from Kleiner Perkins and Vicus Ventures.

The London insurance technology company builds AI agents for commercial insurance brokers to handle routine parts of placing business, including reading client submissions, preparing broker documents and approaching insurers for terms.

Its software is already in use with brokers in the UK, US and Europe, including ACIC Financial Advisory in Austria, a top 10 UK broker and the specialty lines division of a top US broker.

Ancep focuses on a part of the commercial insurance market where brokers often decide not to proceed because the work involved outweighs the commission earned. It estimates that as much as 30% of the risks seen by a broker fall below that threshold, and that about half of those could still be placed profitably.

The issue has become more pressing as commercial insurance rates continue to fall. Ancep says global commercial insurance rates declined 6% in the second quarter of 2026, marking an eighth consecutive quarterly fall.

For brokers, the time needed to place a small policy can be similar to that required for a much larger one. As a result, lower-value risks are often turned away or left waiting, leaving potential revenue unbooked.

One customer division reported a 10% revenue increase within six weeks of going live with Ancep's product. Its agents work within the systems brokers already use, including policy administration systems, e-trading portals and customer relationship management software.

That matters in a market where large brokers often run many legacy systems at once after years of acquisitions. Rather than requiring a separate build for each platform, Ancep says its agents can operate inside those existing environments.

Broker workflow

Brokers remain responsible for final decisions. Only an authorised broker can bind cover, while broking teams review agent outputs before they take effect.

Each client operates in its own isolated environment, and data is not pooled or used across brokerages without explicit consent. Ancep charges customers based on a share of the value created, meaning its fees are tied to business written by the broker.

At ACIC Financial Advisory, which specialises in credit insurance and surety, the software supports work such as reviewing policy wordings, comparing insurer terms, preparing market submissions and extracting information from large document sets.

Ancep says this has reduced time spent on administrative groundwork and allowed staff to take on more clients without increasing administrative headcount. Specialists have used the recovered time for client advice, expansion into new markets and product development.

Founded this year, Ancep was set up by Gagan Khurana and Jake Turner after the pair worked together at Scope AI. There, Khurana led sales and Turner led engineering as revenue grew from almost nothing to USD $2 million in less than a year and the business raised a USD $20 million Series A from Index Ventures.

Khurana and Turner first met at Oxford. Before launching Ancep, Turner had also interviewed more than 50 brokers during an earlier venture, while Khurana's previous work at McKinsey included insurance assignments that exposed him to brokers' operating challenges.

The round also included angel backing from Christa Davies, Former Chief Financial Officer of Aon, as well as operators from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind.

"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. So we are not building around them, we are building for them, and we are starting with the twenty largest in the world," Gagan Khurana, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Ancep, said.

Christoph Zawadil, Managing Director at A.C.I.C. Financial Advisory, said: "Credit insurance and surety is specialist work, but a lot of a broker's week goes on comparing insurer wordings, preparing market submissions, extracting information from large volumes of documents. Ancep understood that workflow deeply, rather than trying to sell us generic AI, which is why adoption across the business has been exceptionally high. We did not do this to cut costs but to get our specialists' time back, and they are now using it to advise clients, expand into new markets and build insurance products we didn't have the capacity to design previously."

Simon Schmincke, Partner at Creandum, said: "Commercial insurance is a $3 trillion market that has absorbed ten years of software promises without much changing inside the largest brokers. 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. Most AI in this market is a bet against the intermediary, but Ancep is the first company we have seen that makes it more valuable instead. We're excited to back them in that mission."

Mamoon Hamid, Partner at Kleiner Perkins, said: "Commercial insurance is a large market where too much business still goes unserved because the economics don't work. Ancep is using AI to change that equation while keeping brokers at the center. We're excited to support Gagan, Jake, and the Ancep team as they expand what brokers can profitably serve."