Today, the Artificial Intelligence Underwriting Company (AIUC) is emerging from stealth with a $15 million seed round led by Nat Friedman at NFDG, with participation from Emergence, Terrain, and notable angels including Anthropic cofounder Ben Mann and former CISOs from Google Cloud and MongoDB. The company’s goal? Build the insurance, audit, and certification infrastructure needed to bring AI agents safely into the enterprise world.
That’s right: Insurance policies for AI agents. AIUC cofounder and CEO Rune Kvist says that insurance for agents—that is, autonomous AI systems capable of making decisions and taking action without constant human oversight—is about to be big business. Previously the first product and go-to-market hire at Anthropic in 2022, Kvist’s founding team also includes CTO Brandon Wang, a Thiel Fellow who previously founded a consumer underwriting business, and 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.
Creating financial incentives to reduce risk of AI agent adoption
At the heart of AIUC’s approach is a new risk and safety framework called AIUC-1, designed specifically for AI agents. It pulls together existing standards like the NIST AI Risk Management Framework, the EU AI Act, and MITRE’s ATLAS threat model—then layers on auditable, agent-specific safeguards. The idea is simple: make it easy for enterprises to adopt AI agents with the same kind of trust signals they expect in cloud security or data privacy.
