The Artificial Intelligence Underwriting Company (AIUC), a new firm that combines audits, standards, and insurance to enable enterprises to confidently adopt AI to unlock progress, has announced its launch following a successful $15 million seed funding round.
According to AIUC, the company has launched with the second largest seed round in insurance history, which was led by Nat Friedman at NFDG, with participation from Emergence, Terrain, and others such as Ben Mann, co-founder of Anthropic, and former chief information security officers at both Google Cloud and MongoDB.
The company’s aim is to “unlock the next wave of AI progress by building the confidence infrastructure for AI agents.”
Although still relatively new to the mainstream, AI has and continues to advance at a rapid pace, and while proof of concepts are emerging across many sectors, AIUC explains that many enterprises are somewhat hesitant to deploy AI agents “that feel like black boxes.”
The reality is that with so many AI tools to choose from, many enterprises are unsure on which tools they can trust or who will be accountable if something goes wrong.
“There’s a fear that hallucinated responses or unsafe outputs could lead to customer harm, revenue loss, regulatory risk, or reputational fallout,” says the company.
AIUC aims to shift this trend and assist entities as they look to adopt AI to remain relevant and competitive in a rapidly changing world. The firm says that it “gives enterprises a way to adopt AI with confidence, before their competitors do it faster,” and to achieve this, is structured around three pillars: Standards, Audits, and Insurance.
On the first pillar, AIUC explains: “AIUC-1 is a security and risk framework built specifically for AI agents. Think of it as “SOC-2 for AI agents.” The standard is designed to speed up enterprise adoption by addressing the technical, legal and operational safeguards that matter most to enterprise buyers. AIUC-1 builds on existing trusted frameworks, including the NIST’s AI Risk Management Framework, the EU AI Act, and MITRE’s ATLAS–and goes further by defining clear, auditable requirements. That means AI companies can be certified against it, giving enterprises a concrete signal of safety and trust.”
On the second pillar, the company notes that for AI agents, independent audits provide enterprises with the confidence they need to adopt these systems. “AIUC conducts rigorous testing of AI agents against the AIUC-1 standard. These audits identify vulnerabilities, quantify risk, and give enterprises a clear view of the AI systems they are evaluating, before actually deploying. This process is structured to be objective, repeatable, and aligned with enterprise-grade expectations for safety and trust.”
On the third pillar, insurance, AIUC underlines how insurance has made bold progress possible in the US throughout history, so is an important component of the company’s offering.
“AIUC offers liability coverage for AI vendors and their customers in case an agent fails. The cost and availability of insurance are tied directly to audit results: safer systems are offered better terms. This aligns incentives for builders, buyers and insurers, making it easier for enterprises to adopt new technology with confidence,” explains the company.
In terms of the team at AIUC, Rune Kvist, the first product and go-to-market hire at US AI firm Anthropic and member of the board of the Center for AI Safety, is one of the co-founders and serves as CEO. Brandon Wang is another co-founder and serves as the firm’s CTO. Wang is a Thiel Fellow who previously founded a consumer underwriting business. The third co-founder is Rajiv Dattani, a former McKinsey partner who led work in the global insurance sector, and was COO of METR, a research non-profit that evaluated OpenAI and Anthropic’s models before deployment.
AIUC’s founders have extensive experience in insurance, as well as technical testing from the specialist Lloyd’s insurance and reinsurance marketplace, Anthropic, and the Center for AI Safety, which makes them well positioned for such a venture.
The company says that it has a “concrete plan to get insurers innovating in AI without having to take on the huge risks they are all scared of.” To start, the focus will be on risks like data & privacy, security.
Kvist commented: “This is the path forward for faster, more secure AI adoption. Every major technological leap in history, from electricity and automobiles to flight and the internet, was unlocked by private market insurance. That is what we’re building for this major leap. Confidence infrastructure that rewards responsibility, unlocks speed, and enables enterprises to make informed decisions.”
Source: https://www.reinsurancene.ws/
