We dive deep into our sectors. Our research drives our insights and thesis-driven approach.

In recent years, “specialty” has been among the most promising areas of growth in the insurance industry, as more premiums flow towards underwriters and programs focused on increasingly specific niches and markets. As loss ratios creep higher, insurers are looking for higher and less volatile profits. A decade of insurtech innovation provides underwriters with new approaches for loss control, and the ability to rethink how insurance is written and distributed.

The Equal team attended Insurtech Connect 2025 in Las Vegas — the largest annual gathering of innovators and investors in insurance. As always, we came away with a clearer sense of how the industry is evolving and what themes insiders are most excited about. Continuing last year’s trend, the conversation has shifted decisively toward the impact of AI and agentic workflows. The “pie-in-the-sky” promises of a few years ago have given way to real deployments, tangible productivity gains, and a sense that the next wave of automation is already here.

Core to Equal’s investment philosophy is finding ways for technology to have impact where it’s previously been under-utilized. While there are many markets where there are known buyers for high functioning products, we’ve witnessed many large markets that experience extremely limited willingness-to-pay for software where it makes more sense for startups to “eat” the core advantages of their IP. My colleague Ali highlighted this in one of our most recent posts, introducing the concept of “Hidden AI”. For these companies, AI is at the core of their competitive advantage, but is rarely seen to the end customer. On the outside, they appear to operate much like incumbents, but underneath the surface is where all the competitive advantage lies.

As we highlighted in our recent Insurance x AI and Logistics x AI posts, we’re starting to see the first wave of breakout Vertical AI companies across sectors. We’ve been tracking many of these closely and have backed several thus far. As we’ve done so, we’ve started to see a few distinct patterns emerge in how AI takes shape across industries, and how market conditions allow certain approaches to flourish over others.

This past week, we participated in Climate Week NYC with our biggest Climate Capital Summit yet. For us, it was important to bring an audience bigger in scope and scale than we had in the past given the tumultuous state of the climate universe.