£4.9m · Seed · Fintech · London, UK
London-based i23 has raised £4.9m in an oversubscribed Seed round to build an AI-native commercial insurance broker. Sky News reports that Outward VC, Seedcamp, Insiders VC and Four Cities Capital jointly led the financing.
The company was founded by Anand Sambasivan, a co-founder of retail-investment platform PrimaryBid, and Bim Afolami, a former UK economic secretary to the Treasury. Sambasivan is chief executive and Afolami is president. Tech.eu reports that the founding team also includes former PrimaryBid chief operating officer Mike Coombes and Opriva co-founder Salman Valibeik.
Owning the brokerage changes the automation model
i23 describes its product as an agentic operating model for commercial insurance broking. Rather than replacing brokers, the company says its software will take on routine administration while helping brokers generate more revenue and spend more time serving clients. That positioning matters because the business is not being presented as a standalone software vendor: Sky News says i23 expects to acquire an existing insurance broker in the coming months.
An acquisition would give the team an operating brokerage in which to deploy its agents across real customer, policy and back-office workflows. It could also tie the technology's economics directly to the broker's results. If administrative work grows more slowly than client revenue, i23 can test Sambasivan's argument that a larger book of business need not require a proportionally larger back office. The acquisition remains a plan, however; neither the target nor its timing and terms have been disclosed.
The service-first structure creates a different execution test from selling one automation tool into many brokerages. i23 will need its agents to work across the processes and systems of the business it acquires, while preserving the human expertise that Afolami says the model is intended to amplify. Early evidence will therefore come from operating outcomes inside the brokerage: which administrative tasks can be delegated reliably, whether brokers gain usable client time, and whether the model improves revenue without weakening service.
The founders bring experience from both financial technology and policy. Sambasivan helped build PrimaryBid, which opened public-company capital raises to retail investors before its acquisition by SoFi. Afolami served as economic secretary to the Treasury from 2023 to 2024. That background may help i23 navigate a regulated industry, but the commercial case still depends on execution inside the acquired business rather than credentials alone.
The company has not disclosed customers, revenue or detailed use of proceeds. The Seed round therefore backs a specific operating thesis at an early stage: buy a brokerage, automate enough of its repetitive work to expand broker capacity, and prove that human advice and agent-driven operations can scale together.
Sources checked:
Sky News · Tech.eu · Tech.eu Funding Explorer
