Insurance is complicated. Customers have questions before they quote, need guidance after, and expect clarity when they file a claim. But the work of answering those questions, collecting documents, and following up still runs on calls, emails, and portals stitched together by manual effort. For brokers and carriers, this coordination overhead is one of the most operationally expensive and taxing parts of the business.
General Magic is building AI agents to solve this problem.
Today, the company announced a US$7.2M seed funding round led by Radical Ventures, with significant participation from a16z Speedrun and new investment from Figma VP of Product Brendan O’Driscoll and Larry James Erwin from OpenAI. The company has raised $8.4M to date, backed by Radical Ventures, a16z Speedrun, and Comma Capital, along with operators who have built foundational AI and product platforms, including Aidan Gomez, CEO of Cohere, as well as the executive team at Braze, including Kevin Wang, Chief Product Officer, and Spencer Burke, SVP of Growth.
General Magic builds AI agents that take over the work insurance teams spend the most time on: answering routine questions, collecting documents, and following up with customers when clarity matters. These agents work across the full insurance lifecycle, covering pre-quote eligibility, post quote engagement, and claims coordination. They do all of this while connecting directly to broker management systems, quoting platforms, and CRMs.
Early deployments show what’s possible. Working with one of the world’s largest general insurers, General Magic has reduced time-to-quote from roughly 30 minutes down to under 3 minutes via its SMS-based agent.
The company’s agentic offerings are centered around a product called Cell, a proactive AI agent that connects directly to the systems insurance teams already use. Cell integrates with broker management systems, quoting and rating platforms and CRMs to support teams. It can be deployed across SMS, iMessage and RCS, and can extend into policy, billing and claims workflows as needed.
When a customer has a question, they can text Cell over SMS, or the insurance team can proactively deploy it to the customer. The agent responds using real system data, asks for missing information, follows up automatically, and updates records as workflows progress. Conversations stay in one thread, context is preserved, and customers move forward at their own pace without being chased or dropped.
Early deployments point to the scale of the opportunity. In early rollouts with large personal lines insurers, General Magic is reducing the time required to generate and finalize quotes from roughly 30 minutes to about 3 minutes by automating routine clarification and follow ups over SMS across auto and life insurance workflows. This increase in speed expands effective quoting capacity while keeping customers engaged through the most failure prone part of the journey after a quote is issued. By handling frequent questions and coordination over text, the agent reduces delays and prevents conversations from stalling. General Magic is currently supporting deployments with carriers across auto and life insurance, where post quote follow through and customer coordination are most critical.
In parallel, the team is focused on building agents that understand the realities of insurance distribution, including licensing and regulatory frameworks such as RIBO, OTL, and other broker and advisor exams. By specializing agents around how licensed professionals are trained to communicate, General Magic aims to ensure conversations feel accurate, compliant, and aligned with how insurance teams actually explain coverage to customers.
General Magic was founded by Anthony Azrak and Jai Mansukhani, second-time founders who previously sold AI products into legacy industries. The company’s move into insurance came from firsthand frustration. After a water leak spiraled into weeks of calls, delays, and higher premiums, the founders began exploring how common this experience really was. What they found was an industry that technically works, but often fails customers and intermediaries in the moments that matter most. That insight shaped General Magic’s decision to go deep into insurance rather than remain a horizontal AI platform.
The broader industry context underscores the urgency. Retention rates in insurance lag behind other sectors, and acquiring new customers costs significantly more than keeping existing ones. As digital distribution accelerates and customers shop more aggressively at renewal, both carriers and brokers that fail to improve post-quote engagement risk losing revenue they already worked to win.
Looking ahead, General Magic plans to expand across insurance lines and workflows, staying focused on moments where customer intent is high and coordination most often breaks down. The platform is being built to support high impact workflows across the insurance stack, prioritizing areas where follow through fails today and where fixing it creates meaningful value for customers, brokers, and carriers.
The long term vision is simple but ambitious: make follow through automatic, reliable, and invisible. By removing the need for manual chasing and fragmented handoffs, teams can spend less time managing processes and more time serving end customers. The team is motivated by solving complex, real world problems that sit at the center of insurance operations, with the goal of delivering tangible improvements to how people experience insurance when it matters most.
ShinyHunters Pwns Odido affecting millions
Posted in Commentary with tags Hacked on February 24, 2026 by itnerdThe ShinyHunters extortion gang has claimed responsibility for breaching Dutch telecommunications provider Odido and stealing millions of user records from its compromised systems.
Commenting on this news is Lidia Lopez, Senior Threat Intelligence Analyst at Outpost24:
“This incident fits a pattern we have been tracking from 2025 into 2026: ShinyHunters-linked operations often rely on social engineering to get legitimate access into SaaS environments, then export data and use leak sites for extortion. The common playbook is email and phone pretexting where attackers impersonate IT, a vendor, or support and push a fake “required update” or “security tool,” or trick staff into authorizing a rogue connected app. That gives them access through the identity layer, which can open downstream systems like customer support and contact platforms used across many organizations.
For Odido, “ShinyHunters” claims the breach is larger and includes “plain text” passwords, but that specific claim should be treated as unverified until independently validated or confirmed by the company or the authorities. Researchers suspect that the “plain text password” could refer to a readable password-like field in a CRM, such as a customer-service verification word stored in Salesforce, rather than customers’ online login passwords. Either way, plain text storage is serious: if it is a verification word, it makes impersonation and account fraud much easier when combined with identity data and financial identifiers; if it is an actual login password, it enables immediate account takeover at scale because attackers do not need to crack anything and password reuse can cascade the impact far beyond Odido.”
This is big as Odido has 6.9 million customers as of January 2024. So it is a safe bet that this will not end well for any of those customers. Which highlights the fact that all efforts need to be taken to keep the bad guys out so that conversations like this are not the norm.
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