Novella raises $21 million to expand AI-powered insurance brokerage
Novella closed a $21 million round to scale AI agents that handle submissions, quoting and renewals, betting brokers can do far more without losing judgment.
Novella has raised $21 million to push deeper into AI-powered wholesale insurance brokerage, with the company using the money to recruit more brokers, open regional offices and keep building the software that sits behind its placement desk. Brewer Lane Ventures led the round, joined by Box Group, Crystal Venture Partners, SV Angel, Avid Ventures, Verissimo Ventures, Blank Ventures and Arch.
The pitch is not that AI replaces wholesale brokers. It is that it removes enough repetitive work to let them handle far more business. Novella says its agents can help with submission intake, market matching, quoting, placement, binding, form comparison, policy review, subjectivity collection, inspections, billing, endorsements and renewals. That makes the platform feel less like a narrow automation add-on and more like a brokerage operating system built to widen producer capacity.
Novella was founded in 2024 by Max Kane, who spent almost four years at Lemonade, Michael Tsibelman, a former Microsoft engineering leader and now the company’s chief technology officer, and Alex Broome, head of brokerage, who previously worked at The Baldwin Group and ReShield and earlier built FounderShield. The company is based in New York, has a research and development center in Tel Aviv, and already operates offices in Miami and Houston, with Southern California next on its expansion list.
The brokerage says it is licensed in all 50 U.S. states, has appointments with close to 100 specialty carriers and managing general agents, and is already routing business from more than 3,500 retail agencies through its platform. Business Insurance reported that Novella had about 20 employees, including seven brokers, and that the brokerage team was expected to double in the coming weeks. Novella also said its average premium per account is about $50,000 and is trending toward $100,000.
That growth has fed bigger ambitions. Novella says it wants to become one of the five largest wholesale excess and surplus brokers in the United States within a decade and is targeting $10 billion in premium volume over that period. The company’s participation in Lloyd’s Lab, the Lloyd’s of London startup accelerator, adds another layer of credibility in a market that still rewards underwriting access and carrier relationships as much as software.
Brewer Lane general partner Chris Downer framed the bet as one on human leverage, not human replacement. That matters in wholesale broking, where relationships still drive placement, but the operational burden is heavy enough that better tooling can change how much each broker can produce.
The timing also fits a specialty market that is still growing, even if the pace has cooled. S&P Global said the U.S. domestic E&S market’s growth rate fell into the single digits in 2025 for the first time since 2018, while Conning said domestic E&S insurers wrote $75.5 billion in direct premiums in 2022 and the market kept expanding in 2023. For investors, that is the appeal: a large, still-growing market where software can lift speed to quote, reduce friction and turn experienced brokers into true super-producers.
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