Cara Raises $8 Million to Help Every Insurance Brokerage Grow Its Book

Cara, the AI platform for insurance brokerages, today announced $8 million in seed funding led by Kearny Jackson, with participation from Claire Hughes Johnson (Former COO, Stripe), Kevin Mahaffey (Founder, SNR), Sam Hodges (CEO, Vouch Insurance), and Colin Evans (Startups and Partnerships, OpenAI). Cara gives insurance brokerages, agencies and wholesalers the AI infrastructure to grow, automating sales and servicing workflows so teams write more business, reduce errors, and keep clients better served.

Cara was founded by Vic Yeh, Nikhil Kansal, and Jonathan Patel, operators from Blend Labs, Stripe, and Strategy&, who built and sold a digital insurance brokerage, created the tools to run it, and are now turning it into a battle-tested product for every insurance professional in the country. 

“We built Cara because we lived this problem,” said Vic Yeh, Co‑Founder & CEO of Cara. “As part of a trillion-dollar global insurance industry, agencies and brokerages are drowning in operational work when they should be out writing new business and building client relationships. Cara is growing at an incredible rate with massive opportunity ahead. Over 80 percent of our customers come from organic word-of-mouth growth, which speaks to how deeply it solves a critical scaling challenge for insurance brokerages.”

Cara helps insurance agencies and brokerages by automating coverage comparisons, proposal and COI generation, ACORD and supplemental form fill, E&O review, and client requests via voice and email AI – a 24/7 AI workforce that integrates directly with existing agency management systems (AMS) and customer relationship management (CRM). What takes 90 minutes by hand takes roughly two minutes on Cara. The platform is trusted by leading insurance brokerage customers and partners, including The McGowan Companies, Atlas Insurance Brokers, ISU Steadfast, Combined Agents of America, and FirstChoice.

“Our enthusiasm behind Cara is simple: the $100B insurance software market is primed for AI disruption. It’s workflow heavy, data rich, and still largely manual, making it a perfect fit for AI and automation,” said Sriram Krishnan, Co‑Founder and General Partner at Kearny Jackson.

“We backed this team because they didn’t just imagine the future, they operated it,” said Sunil Chhaya, Co‑Founder and General Partner at Kearny Jackson. “Having built and scaled a brokerage with these tools, they’re now turning that playbook into a platform for the entire industry. This lived experience is the reason why thousands of brokers and agents trust Cara AI.”

The $8 million seed round will fund insurance-specific AI research and product development, deeper integrations with agency management and CRM systems and team growth. Cara is launching a platform expansion that moves beyond smart assistance to a full operating layer across the agency’s tech stack. For the first time, independent agencies, brokerages and wholesalers will have a system working during and after business hours, managing tasks and workflows that consume up to 70 percent of an agent’s day.