Underwritten This Week-ish: It's all over! KimGPT! Everything is fine!
Here's what I saw this week that kept me thinking. Maybe you'll like it, too.
Are we cooked or not?
Reading tech and industry news this week swung my pendulum in both directions. The announcement last week the Munich Re is shutting down gave me a queasy feeling, until I read the article. AI continues to eat the world and become a powerful tool that really, really needs an instruction manual, as Kim K learned. And, it turns out there’s plenty of money pouring into Insurtech.
Dig it.
Funding & M&A
Munich Re Ventures Shuts Down After 10 Years
Oh shit oh shit oh shit
Source: Coverager | Date: Oct 28, 2025
Summary: Munich Re is closing Munich Re Ventures after a decade, ceasing all new investments and consolidating venture capital activities into MEAG, its asset management arm. The 40-person unit managed $1.2 billion across multiple funds with nearly 100 investments, including unicorns like Next Insurance (acquired by Munich Re for $2.6 billion this year), Hippo, At-Bay, and Augury. Munich Re posted a record €2.1 billion profit in Q2 2025 and is on track for €6 billion this year, indicating the shutdown isn’t driven by financial difficulties but rather a strategic shift to source innovation exclusively from core business units.
Top Insurtech Funding Rounds, October 2025
*phew*
Source: Digital Insurance | Date: Nov 4, 2025
Summary: October saw approximately 65 insurtech funding events, with notable rounds including Roots Automation’s $50M Series B for AI-powered insurance operations, INSTANDA’s $20M for its no-code insurance platform, and Life, a Bitcoin life insurance company, raising $82M. FurtherAI secured $25M Series A from Andreessen Horowitz to build AI workflows for underwriters and claims teams, while specialty MGA platform Dayforward raised $15M. The analysis focused on venture-capital financing in the insurtech and P&C sectors, excluding private equity infusions from the detailed breakdown.
Industry Perspective
AI’s Dial-Up Era
Insert CD for more minutes
Source: Wreflection (Substack) | Date: Nov 2025
Summary: This essay argues we’re in 1995 again, but with AI instead of the internet. Drawing on 200 years of automation data across textiles, steel, and automotive industries, the author shows employment outcomes depend on a race between unmet market demand and productivity gains—when demand saturates while automation continues, employment declines. The piece predicts the AI bubble will follow the dotcom pattern: spectacular failures, overbuilt infrastructure that outlasts the hype, and unpredictable transformations like how “journalist” evolved into blogger, influencer, and YouTuber. Geoffrey Hinton’s 2016 prediction that radiologists would be replaced proved wrong—radiology positions hit record highs in 2025 with average salaries of $520,000—but the author argues this was the wrong job to examine given its complexity, regulation, and high stakes.
The AI Rag
Kim Kardashian Says ChatGPT ‘Made Me Fail’ Law Exams
KimGPT is not the right model
Source: International Business Times UK | Date: Nov 2025
Kim Kardashian admitted during a Vanity Fair polygraph segment that she’s been using ChatGPT to answer legal questions while studying for the California bar exam, calling it a “toxic friendship” because the AI consistently gives wrong answers. She regularly uploads images of legal questions to get answers, but claims the bot has made her fail tests “all the time.”
Why AI Correspondence Will Become Table Stakes in Insurance
Because your copy/paste sucks
Source: Coverager | Date: Oct 30, 2025
Summary: Voltaire CEO Yo Sub Kwon argues that AI-powered claims correspondence will shift from innovative to table stakes within five years, similar to online claims filing. Claims adjusters currently face an impossible productivity choice between using slow official letter-writing systems or copying old letters to meet targets. Meanwhile, plaintiff attorneys are already operating billion-dollar AI platforms like EvenUp that scrutinize every word in claims letters, while communication errors cost mid-sized carriers over $6.4 million annually in claims leakage.
What I’m Thinking
Honestly, this week it’s been all about the hustle for me. We’re out for capital and bringing on some great new customers following Insurtech Connect. The insurance industry is “getting it” when it comes to actually selling online.
The dichotomy between Munich Re shutting down and almost a quarter billion in investment being deployed in Insurtech by VCs tells this story. It seems Munich Re made a commitment to figure it out themselves with the newly acquired Next team, and that makes a ton of sense! Carriers, brokers, and reinsurers should be buying or buying from experts in the digital commerce world and focusing on capturing an enormous market opportunity.
There’s also no question about the ability of AI to transform how we do business and conduct our lives outside of work. I believe that it’s a useful tool, and like so many other powerful tools in the history of humanity, the winners will be those who develop mastery and creative use of it. At Buddy, we see the Kim K problem of wanting help in regulated and technical subjects as a massive opportunity, and we are helping our customers migrate their products into AI-ready data every day.
Back to Work
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