There is a moment in commercial insurance that keeps repeating itself, and I watched it happen enough times that it eventually stopped being frustrating and started being interesting as a problem. A small-business owner calls their broker to ask about commercial coverage. The broker takes the intake information. The call ends without an answer. The broker follows up two or three days later with a quote, or with questions that require another call to gather more information, and by then the urgency of the original conversation has dissipated. The business owner is still uninsured or underinsured, and both parties have spent time they do not have on an inconclusive process.
This is not a failure of effort or expertise. Brokers who serve small commercial accounts are often doing the best they can with a workflow that was designed for a different era. The underwriting queue, the carrier appetite research, the back-and-forth on application completeness: these are structural features of how commercial lines have worked for decades. They were built for an environment where the volume and diversity of commercial risks made algorithmic processing impractical. That environment has changed.
The problem is solvable now
The data infrastructure for commercial lines underwriting has improved significantly over the past several years. Business registration data, loss history reporting, industry classification standards, and geographic risk data are all more accessible and more structured than they were even five years ago. The machine learning methods for pattern recognition across heterogeneous risk types have matured enough to apply reliably to commercial insurance underwriting without requiring the simplification that killed commercial lines automation in earlier generations of the technology.
What had not happened, as of when Priya Mehta and I started building Attune in early 2024, was putting those components together in a form that a commercial lines broker could actually use during an intake conversation. The available technology was oriented toward carrier back-office efficiency or enterprise-scale submission management. The independent broker at a four-person agency, handling a mix of personal and commercial lines, who needed to give a small-business owner an answer during a phone call, had no tool designed specifically for that moment.
That specific moment, the intake call with a quotable small commercial risk, is where we decided to start. Not because it is the hardest problem in commercial insurance technology, but because it is the highest-leverage intervention point for the population of small businesses that currently fall through the gap. If the broker can give a directional answer during the call, the coverage conversation continues. If the broker cannot, there is a meaningful probability that it does not continue at the same level of urgency.
Why brokers, not direct distribution
We made a deliberate decision not to build a direct-to-business platform. There are arguments for direct distribution in simple commercial segments, and some platforms are executing reasonably well in those segments. We are not disputing that. We are building for the segment where direct distribution does not work well: the small commercial accounts with genuine complexity, prior claims, multi-class operations, or state-market challenges that require a broker who knows the carriers and can advocate for the placement.
The broker in that context is not a cost to be disintermediated. The broker is the person with the trust relationship, the market knowledge, and the professional accountability to get the placement right. What the broker needs is better tools at the point where speed and clarity determine whether the conversation converts. Building a tool for that specific need, rather than building around the broker, is the direction we chose and the one we are committed to.
Marcus Bellamy joined us to lead product because he had spent years building on the operational side of broker-facing insurance technology. He had watched those tools get built from a carrier-efficiency perspective and deployed to brokers as an afterthought. The broker-first framing is not marketing. It reflects a view about where the value actually gets delivered in this distribution model and which improvements have the most downstream impact on whether small businesses get covered.
What we are not trying to be
Attune is not trying to become a carrier. We are not in the business of underwriting risk or bearing exposure. The platform scores risk and returns a decision; licensed brokers make the placement with licensed carriers. That division is not a regulatory technicality. It reflects a genuine belief that the underwriting expertise and risk-bearing capability should sit with the entities built to hold it, and that the technology layer adds the most value by making the interface between brokers and carriers faster and more accurate rather than by inserting itself into the risk chain.
We are also not trying to solve the full breadth of commercial insurance. BOP and general liability for small commercial accounts is the ground where the gap is largest and the technology application is most mature. Expanding from there is a matter of building out the risk scoring calibration and carrier appetite data for additional classes and coverage types. That work is ongoing and will take time to do correctly. The right approach to expanding coverage breadth is to do it when the model is ready, not to promise capability the platform has not earned.
New York as the home base
We are headquartered in Lower Manhattan because that is where the commercial insurance industry has its institutional center of gravity in the United States. The carrier relationships, the reinsurance markets, the broker networks, and the regulatory infrastructure that matters most to what we are building are all concentrated in and around this city. Being in New York is not an incidental choice. It is where we need to be to build the carrier relationships that make the platform useful and to hire people with the domain expertise that the work requires.
Attune is early. The platform launched in August 2025. We are in an active early-access program with a small cohort of commercial lines brokers, and we are learning from every session. The founding premise, that the commercial lines quoting workflow is fixable in a way that changes outcomes for small businesses and the brokers who serve them, has not changed. The work of building toward it is what we are doing every day.
