For Commercial Insurance, Honesty Is the Best Policy

Insurance has always been the quiet force that lets ambition outrun risk.

In the late 1600s, merchants crowded into a London coffeehouse to do something radical: share the risk of sending ships into the unknown. That simple promise turned ruinous voyages into bets worth making, and global trade followed. Around the same time, after the Great Fire leveled London, the new idea of fire insurance (which included actual fire brigades) gave people not only the resilience to rebuild, but the regained confidence to bet on the urban density that now defines today’s modern cities. And when factories started running on boilers that could explode, insurance made it possible to keep betting on steam, the revolutionary power behind the infrastructure that eventually built our modern economy.

Sadly, these days, insurance has lost sight of the people and ambition for whom and which it was built. Instead of being an uplifting partner to innovators, entrepreneurs, and commercial protagonists to realize their dreams, it’s become a bureaucratic nightmare that drags down the very businesses it was meant to propel. Insurance went from the force that once let ambition outrun risk to just being another risk ambition has to outrun.

That's why today we're launching Mandl, an AI company that’s rebuilding the engine of insurance on a foundation of honesty, with the goal of advancing economic ambition and abundance.

The strangest product in the world

Insurance is a strange thing to buy. You pay for it every month, you hope you never use it, and the only way to find out whether it's any good is on the worst day you'll ever have. That's because what you're really buying is a promise that when you take the risk of building something, someone will stand behind you if it goes wrong.

At Mandl, we think too many of those promises are created poorly and kept slowly. In our view, the solution is to price risk for what it really is, keep the promise fast, and get businesses back to their ambitions. In short, honesty is the best policy, and that belief runs deeply through each of Mandl’s three companies: Nirvana, Vega, and Cooper.

Nirvana creates better promises with AI

A fleet that invests in safety shouldn't pay the same as one that doesn't. Obviously. Yet the industry does exactly that, because it prices risk from generic categories and averages. Zoom out, and the premiums that businesses pay aren't buying better coverage. Instead, they're funding guesswork and inefficiency: America's ten largest trucking companies spent more than 50% more on insurance and claims in 2025 than in 2021¹. Meanwhile, the businesses that form the backbone of the American economy are already absorbing record costs from supply chains, inflation, and diesel. Insurance shouldn't be one more.

Instead, the promise of insurance should mean that the best operators pay the least. With Nirvana they finally can. Nirvana’s vision is to advance our understanding of risk, and its mission is to decode every risk with precision. To get there, the team is already leveraging more than 50 billion miles of driving data, matched to real claims outcomes and the most intelligent models in the industry as far as we know. In a few short years, it’s struck a chord and the business has grown to more than $300 million in run-rate premium with top-tier loss ratio performance. This shows that a better promise can also be a better price, and that the market is hungry for this type of honesty.

Vega keeps promises better with AI

A claim is the moment you learn whether your insurance company keeps its promise.

Every day a claim stays open, costs climb and trust erodes. A truck waiting on a claim isn’t hauling, and a business waiting on a payout can’t rebuild, yet 94% of business owners worry their insurance won’t cover them when something goes wrong². And according to data reported by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC), for twenty years now the most common complaint to state insurance regulators has been the same: insurers are slow to pay. In fact, delays alone account for more than one in five complaints, and denials and disputed settlements add another quarter.³

It shouldn’t take weeks or months to resolve an issue you’ve already paid for.

That’s why we built Vega, an AI-native claims administrator, from the ground up. Our vision is to advance commercial resilience, because resolving a claim should mean getting back to business. In less than two years, Vega has already made claims resolution four times faster than the industry standard. We’re proud of that, but we’re not done. Our mission is to proactively resolve a claim in minutes.

Cooper empowers the promise keepers with AI

We didn't stop there. The everyday moments between buying a policy and filing a claim require insurance to keep pace with the business it protects.

Take the humble certificate of insurance, or COI. It’s important proof that a policy exists, and most businesses need one before they can start a job. Yet getting one often means an agent pulling up the policy and retyping its details by hand into a decades-old industry form. That can take days on end. Adding a new driver to a trucking policy can take just as long. In an industry already facing a shortage of tens of thousands of drivers, and where annual driver turnover at large carriers averages above 90%, these aren’t just operational inconveniences. They are a threat to the business itself and a far cry from the service that customers deserve.

To fix this, last year we launched Cooper, an AI operations platform built for the commercial insurance office. Cooper is on a mission to make every insurance professional extraordinary; essentially, free up the promise makers and promise keepers so agencies, brokerages, MGAs, and carriers can focus on their clients and on growing their businesses. By creating a platform built on super fast and intelligent, purpose-built AI, Cooper has already helped customers process more than $1 billion in premiums.

Pushing for a better future

We started with one problem and kept going. We first set out to advance our understanding of risk, and so we built Nirvana. Then we set out to advance commercial resilience, and so we built Vega. Most recently, we set out to unleash insurance professionals by building Cooper.

Then we realized: we were rebuilding the whole engine, one working part at a time; forming Mandl was the natural next step to provide a shared hub for innovation, capital, talent, and a belief system of what insurance is for. Starting today, we get the best of both worlds: independently run companies, united by one mission.

While we're only just getting started, we have our ambitions to go deeper where we already operate and expand into more of the industry, investing wherever AI can make commercial insurance work the way it should.

To the team, our customers, brokers, carriers, and reinsurance partners, and to our investors: thank you for backing this ambitious vision from the start and, now, into our next chapter.

I'm excited for the future ahead. If you want to build it with us, we're hiring.

Rushil