British insurtech Meshed, which provides an AI-compliant digital insurance broker service, has raised £950,000 in a pre-seed round to offer commercial insurance for small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs).
The round was led by Haatch, with participation from Aviva via Founders Factory, Exponential Science Foundation, and several angel investors.
Founded by a team of seasoned insurance and tech operators, Meshed aims to tackle one of the sector’s most persistent problems: the inefficiency and high cost of traditional brokerage, which relies on legacy software and manual processes. The company's aim is that by rebuilding the broking stack from the ground up with AI at its core, it will drastically reduce costs, improve coverage accuracy and shorten quote times.
“After nearly 20 years in the industry, I’ve seen just how little has changed,” said Mark Costello, CEO and co-founder.
“Insurance is still too reliant on paperwork, underinsurance is far too common, and fees are often higher than they should be. We built Meshed to change that, to bring costs down for SMEs, give them the right protection and make the whole process faster, simpler, and more transparent.”
Meshed’s platform uses AI-powered browser agents and voice agents to handle tasks like quote gathering, insurer chasing, and policy administration. According to the team, this model can also deliver real-time policy updates, helping businesses avoid the risk of underinsurance as they scale or pivot.
“We’re pretty much rebuilding the entire insurance broking stack so it's AI-native, including the underlying data infrastructure, schemas, and integrations,” said Vincent Liu, Meshed’s CTO and co-founder. “This allows us to let our AI agents loose and ultimately reduce the quoting experience from one hour to nine minutes.”
Meshed has already secured 51 insurer agreements and received regulatory approval as an Appointed Representative from the UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA).
A key problem Meshed aims to solve is underinsurance, which affects around 80 percent of UK SMEs. Many of these businesses rely on outdated coverage because of broker inertia, high switching costs, or poor visibility into changing needs.
“The traditional insurance brokerage model is broken,” said Jake Wells, co-founder and COO.
“Brokers spend too much time buried in paperwork and chasing information, rather than advising and supporting clients. Our AI agents change this fundamentally, handling everything from quote generation to policy management, giving human brokers back the most valuable asset they have - time.”
The funding round’s backers see Meshed as part of a broader wave of AI-first startups targeting legacy-dominated industries like insurance.
“We always want to be on the leading edge of enabling our customers to protect themselves as much as they possibly need to and can. In order to do that, we need to keep finding the latest and the brightest ,” said Arslan Hannani, Chief Innovation Officer at Aviva.
“We have to think about the founding team, the idea, the quality of the founders,” he added. “When it came to Meshed, it was pretty easy for us to get on board.”
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