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Almost like a scene from Fast and Furious, on the weekend on November 9th, 24,000 bottles of Guy Fieri and Sammy Hagar’s Santo Tequila – worth over $1 million – vanished into thin air. Leaving Laredo, Texas the shipment was supposed to arrive at Santo’s warehouse in Lansdale, Pennsylvania, and for all intents and purposes, all signs indicated that it did. The “trucking company” reported delays due to a broken water pump, and GPS signals showed the truck moving along the right route. The product was due Wednesday, but because the scammers spoofed GPS data and provided plausible updates, no one realized anything was wrong until Monday. By then, the tequila was long gone, rerouted to LA, and the entire operation had been executed digitally. The actual truck drivers had no idea they were part of a heist; they were simply following instructions from what they thought was a legitimate carrier.

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.