Meet the quietly impressive startup transforming the top 100 insurance brokers in the US
A spotlight on Fulcrum
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TL;DR
Product-market fit surprisingly fast. Fulcrum is a small, relatively young company. And yet they already count 25 percent of the top 100 insurance brokers in the United States, including M3 and Hylant, as customers.
Solving the hardest problems first. Instead of starting with low-hanging fruit, Fulcrum tackled policy checking: a tedious, 8 to 10 step process with a ton of nuance that used to require lots of frustrated human labor. Fulcrum’s AI can now handle this, and other things, end-to-end. Customers have described Fulcrum as the “Ferrari of policy checking.”
A valuable, but unsexy and underserved, industry. The top 100 brokers in the United States brought in $80.5B last year; the number is $260B for the whole U.S. market. It’s a gold mine of a market that is, by nature, obsessed with the fine print. But with that fine print comes a lot of work that is both tedious and important, which Fulcrum is automating with AI.
Early-stage with massive upside. Fulcrum is small, already has enterprise PMF, and aims to become “the operational backbone of all commercial insurance.” It’s the kind of profile you might look for if you wanted to get in on the ground floor of something potentially huge. Fulcrum is hiring across most departments in SF and is looking for “completionist” people who go deep on nuance.
The conference
You can divide the lifetime of most startups into two spaces: the time during which the founders hoped the idea would work, and the time during which the founders knew the idea would work.
Fulcrum co-founders Arjun Mangla and Sambhav Anand entered the latter space at a conference for insurance brokers in 2024. “We showed up with what I would call half-built workflows, and yet we were still getting stopped constantly,” Arjun said. “Then brokers started calling Fulcrum the ‘Ferrari of policy checking’. People were backing up what they were saying by signing contracts with us at the conference.” That was when it was clear, Arjun says, “that we’d hit product-market fit and needed to double down and scale.”
And scale is precisely what Fulcrum has done. Their product, which automates many of the most important and tedious workflows for people who work at insurance brokers, is currently being used by nearly a third of the United States’ top 50 insurance brokers (including M3 and Hylant). They’re backed by South Park Commons, Broker Tech Ventures, and Foundation Capital, among others, and reached product-market fit (at large enterprises!) while they were still a team of just 12 people.
Fulcrum is currently scaling fast and is hiring across most departments. This could be one of those unique opportunities to get in on a rapidly-growing startup that’s found product-market fit during its earliest innings. If Fulcrum wins big, joining now would mean that you have a good shot at winning big, too.
I wanted to learn a bit more about Fulcrum: what they’re building, where this thing is headed, and what kinds of people would be a good fit to join. I chatted with the team and, below, will share what I learned.
A gold mine with structural problems
Imagine a probably-real woman named Kimberly. She is an Account Manager at one of the largest insurance brokers in the United States. She works in a modest office building in Des Moines, is paid relatively well, and only has to work extra hours sometimes. From an outsiders’ perspective, there is not much complaining you could do about her job. But to Kimberly, some of the work is a nightmare.
One thing Kimberly has to do, for instance, is something called a “policy check”. This is a rigorous review of the insurance policy that has been offered to a client. The goal is to make sure that the insurance policy matches what the client has been quoted; in other words, to verify that the client was not promised something that does not appear in their insurance, which can cause a lot of problems down the road.
To do this well, Kimberly has to pore over the often-gigantic insurance policy with a fine-toothed comb to make sure everything lines up. This takes many hours and is horribly tedious. It is also not a good use of Kimberly’s time. Running a policy check is not the most skilled work she could be doing.
Policy checks are just one of the tedious tasks that Kimberly has to do, but does not particularly want to do: quote comparisons, proposals, and client prep are some of the others. If Kimberly had a magic wand to wave, she would materialize a full-time team of super talented junior employees that could do all of this work for her. This would allow her to work more effectively and manage a bigger book of business.
If Kimberly’s employer (the massive insurance broker) had a magic wand, they would no doubt do the same. The issue is that this is not really possible. No company can afford to have full-time teams of people who only do policy checks or client proposals. Instead, they run with the status quo: talented people do this tedious work in-house, or the company outsources to offshore companies that tend to be low quality and are not always very reliable. But what if that magic wand did exist?
If Fulcrum succeeds, their AI tools can be the solution to this—and other—problems in insurance.
The market, while somewhat unsexy, is a gold mine. Insurance brokers have a lot of money: the top 100 brokers in the United States made $80.5B in 2024, and the total USA market size is ~$260B. And insurance work is, by nature, steeped in fine print. With that fine print comes a lot of tedious work (like Kimberly’s policy checks) that Fulcrum has built a product to automate.
Solving the hardest problems first
There is one approach to startup-building where you start by attacking the low-hanging fruit. You do what is easy, pull in some initial customers, and then use that momentum to attack the hard stuff.
Fulcrum has taken the opposite approach by starting with some of the most nuanced work in insurance. “Policy checking is one of the most risk-sensitive flows in commercial insurance,” Heffernan Insurance Brokers, one of Fulcrum’s customers, wrote. “Even small discrepancies between [what is promised and what is on the policy] can introduce errors and omissions (E&O) exposure.”
But policy checking (and other workflows, like quote comparisons and proposal creation) are some of the most valuable work that insurance brokers would like to take off their team’s plates. So the team at Fulcrum decided to start there. “We always take an end-to-end view: if we touch a workflow, we own it all the way through,” Arjun, Fulcrum’s CEO, told me.
“Policy checking isn’t a cute one-step task,” Arjun said. “It’s an 8 to 10 step process involving hundreds of pages of PDFs, thousands of data points to reconcile, coordination across legacy systems, and tight coupling to the downstream policy delivery process.”
Building a useful version of Fulcrum, then, meant building an AI that would not hallucinate; an AI that was extremely smart; an AI could handle all of the nuance that humans need to handle.
It appears that Fulcrum has achieved such a feat. Today, nearly a third of the top 50 insurance brokers in the United States are Fulcrum customers, including M3 and Hylant. Customers are reporting that their employees are saving 6-8+ hours per week and can handle bigger books of business. Insurance brokers are able to scale further without adding headcount, which is something they are willing to pay a lot for.
Fulcrum has quietly accomplished this without any major funding rounds and without a huge team. I wondere—how? So I started asking questions about their culture.
Going the distance, fast
Things move fast at Fulcrum. “This is my seventh week at the company,” a founding member of the sales team told me, “but I feel like I have already been here for a year.”
Lexie Tonelli, who leads strategy and ops, said that she’s seen co-founder and CTO Sambhav “build in a single weekend what other people have entire companies built around. He’s someone our younger engineers really look up to and learn a ton from, and watching him work makes me feel very confident that we have a true 100x engineer leading the team.” High praise.
More details from the team gave me a similar impression:
“Blink once and there’s a new product or feature released.”
“Team meetings are incredibly productive and effective, [not just] a box to check.”
“People who enjoy living in that tension between speed and completeness [do best here].”
There has been a lot of discussion this year about how many hours people should be expected to work at early-stage startups. When remote work surged during COVID, it felt like things were more relaxed at some companies; work-life balance was a hot topic, anyone could work from home, generous PTO policies were en vogue. Lately, there’s been something of a vibe shift—996 is real at some companies.
So I asked Fulcrum: What is the work expectation for employees?
“This isn’t a 996, but it’s also not a 9 to 5,” Lexie Tonelli told me. “We stay late because we take our work really seriously and are working closely together in person at our SF office.” Not all of this staying late is a relentless grind, though. On Fridays, “Sambhav [co-founder] orders croissants in the morning, and in the afternoon we have our weekly retro - an all-hands where people demo what they’ve been building and we align on priorities for the next week. We usually wrap up with a happy hour, which becomes a nice chance to properly catch up with everyone outside of day-to-day work.”
Should you join Fulcrum?
One of the main reasons you might join an early-stage startup, as opposed to a more established company, is for the equity. Cursor is one recent example—someone who joined after their seed round just 2 years ago is likely worth many millions on paper as of Cursor’s most recent funding round.
Fulcrum looks rather appealing on that front: they are early-stage, which means you likely get more equity than if you joined somewhere at Series C. They have already found product-market fit with some of the biggest insurance brokers in the country. And their vision is massive.
If Fulcrum succeeds, Arjun said, they “become the operational backbone of all commercial insurance. [Eventually], that same orchestration layer [will] extend beyond the brokerage to the entire ecosystem: risk managers, brokers, and carriers all running on a shared data and analytics platform.”
There is more than just the equity, of course. Another reason you might join is to work on a product that fundamentally makes people’s lives better. Kimberly, the possibly-real Account Manager we covered earlier in the essay, is genuinely happy that Fulcrum is taking all of this tedious work off her plate.
If you apply and Fulcrum takes interest, you can probably expect a work trial that resembles the kind of work you’ll do at the company. Throughout the process, you should get a good idea about who you’ll be working with and what they are like. “I had interviewed with other Series A-ish companies that I turned down,” someone on the Fulcrum team told me, “because I didn’t think the founding team was very compelling. Fulcrum was an exception. I felt like I got a really good sense of the founders.”
On the engineering side, you should “care about building really high-quality software.” Founding engineer Tristan Rhodes said that his goal is that Fulcrum’s engineering team is known for building “the most reliable and delightful software provider in the insurance brokerage space,” a goal that requires software engineers who are “honest, appreciate craft, and like to work hard.”
More broadly, you are more likely to succeed at Fulcrum if you are someone who:
Doesn’t like “big tech bs”
“Can appreciate craft, is honest, has a high standard for things”
Is willing to “spend a significant amount of time learning about the insurance industry”
“Care about building really high-quality software”
Prefers “respectful honesty” as opposed to “lies to spare your feelings”
“Have a high bias for action”
Sound like your kind of place? Fulcrum is currently hiring across most departments. They work in-person in San Francisco. If you do not see a fit, you can still try reaching out to someone at the company and explaining how you think you would make Fulcrum more valuable. If you go with that route, read our guide to getting a job with cold email so the message you send to Arjun (or whoever you email!) ends up as something they will find useful. (A LinkedIn DM could work too, one team member told me.)
Thanks to Fulcrum for supporting Next Play and making this piece possible.