Jake Wells, Cofounder at Meshed

0:00Jake Wells:Jake, hello. Welcome to the first episode of Scaling Europe. I'm thrilled to have you. How are you doing? I'm really good, Seb. How are you doing? Pretty good. How's your week been? Yeah, week's been good. Getting some good traction at the moment. And then we did our raise this week. So it's been great getting all the feedback and press. So that's been really exciting this week. Nice. Well, look, before we get into the raise, why don't you give a quick intro into who you are and what you're building? yeah so i'm jake i'm one of the three co-founders at meshed i kind of spent my whole career in insurance started off in underwriting moved more into product management and kind of built a whole array of broker distributed products embedded insurance products from smaller mjs all the way to large kind of blue chip american insurance companies across mjs and brokers and what i'm building at the moment with the team is an ai native commercial insurance broker we really want to level the playing field um in service and we think the ai um can unlock that i think right now brokers can give some amazing service but this is kind of typically reserved to those those bigger accounts um and there are a huge array of kind of small and medium-sized businesses in the uk that maybe don't get the attention that they need not because the brokers don't care they 100 do it's literally because they don't have the time um there's kind of the data that comes out broker reporting kind of backs up i think that 70 of brokers say that they're stressed and overworked so about 56 point of their time goes on me no admin task and i've never met a broker um that likes admin and we really believe that we can kind of strip that admin out um through some of our kind of new agents that we're building of course voice agents browse agents um so that we can have more time with our human brokers um with customers so yeah and that kind of means you're are you equipping uh brokers with like agentic tools is that who you're going after a little bit so we are a broker so we are regulated by the fca as an appointed rep um and come november 3rd will be uh fully authorized um by the fca so yeah so we're basically building tools to make our internal brokers that are matched um faster and better

2:01um it's been it's been good it's been interesting i i i did a lot of that um which was which was new to me and we have an amazing consultant called chris um and she worked with us on that we've kind of effectively done it twice so we had to do our appointed rep piece um we had a principal broker champion up in manchester who have been incredibly helpful throughout the process um which was which was great that took about that took about six weeks i think um with a lot of back and forth a lot of documents and then the direct authorization was a lot bigger i think i must have created over 100 different documents um for that um to get authorized but now now now now it's all done and from the 3rd of november yeah we'll be we'll be fully authorized by the fca

2:39Jake Wells:Amazing, exciting stuff. The first startup I ever worked at was in the insurance space. It was called Collective Benefits, and that's called Onzee. But yeah, there's a lot that you've got to do to get, you've got to dot your I's and cross your T's to make sure that you're in a position to get regulated. Exactly. Can you talk me through a few real-life use cases where maybe your brokers would use your tool to strip away that admin, as you mentioned? Yeah, so we've got some really great use cases within our property area at the moment. So it was taking quite a considerable amount of time to do property broking.

3:15We don't use a system like Actress. A lot of brokers will have the system called Actress. We will go kind of directly to the underwriters in that. And we wanted to build our own technology for that. And that means that now, instead of having Luca, let's say, go and rekey information across the same 10 systems, you're going to go Seb, Seb, Seb, Seb, Seb, accountant, accountant, accountant, accountant into all of these different systems. And what we've got is we've got some browsers. use agents with actually with the help of another guest that you had on the on the previous show um david and his team at asteroid have been kind of helping us um if we're pushing the boundaries of those browser use agents which has been pretty cool um so we've got that um working and then also with some voice agents so we were getting a lot of leads that were coming in um and we kind of needed to get to them quickly so what we would do is we'd have a voice agent that would get answer that phone within a millisecond speak to that speak to that customer and say hey sir just got your details through we'd love to chat to you more um and then it would patch it through to me luke or mark and it would dial out so things that were like taking away time or context switching we're really looking to kind of remove those um and that property process we kind of brought that down from about an hour to about nine minutes um now one of the great use cases we've seen so far

4:24Jake Wells:with the agents amazing yeah very cool that you're working with um with david and asteroid as well yeah one of the things that you've spoken about a lot about is uh fixing the problem of of underinsured SMEs. Can you talk a little bit more about what that problem is and why you think it's important? Yeah, so underinsurance is a massive problem in the market. It depends on whose data you use from any of the big insurers of Eva Allianz. It's between about 40 and 80 percent of SMEs are underinsured. And that kind of happens for a number of different reasons. It might be some owners thinking that they can save some money by kind of undeclaring or trimming cover.

4:57Maybe the broker hasn't had time to catch up with that client and maybe just does an annual check-in and doesn't catch these things um until they're having their kind of renewal review or customers are just too busy um and they don't they don't understand that they need to tell their broker that these things have changed and the example that i kind of use is um i live in london and a lot of restaurants get quite popular quite quickly if it's gone viral on tiktok or it's been on top or something so if you had a restaurant that was kind of ticking over nicely then suddenly you've got this amazing review and you've got queues out the door your turnover is going to increase quite significantly um and if you haven't notified your insurer about that if there was a fire in the kitchen and there was a business interruption claim what the insurer would be paying out would be um what it was when you took the policy out but you might have hired new staff you might have bought a new kit um and you could be you could be in a little bit of a problem um so yeah so we really want to kind of remove that that piece for small businesses because it's it's

5:44Jake Wells:never nice to to find now and it's too late and so what's your i don't know like your solution for finding these people or convincing them or even just letting them know maybe they don't know that they're underinsured how are you tackling that sort of like knowledge gap yeah so that's so we predominantly we want to do that a lot through data so a lot of the a lot of the key the key drivers around that are going to be around kind of turnover payroll or one of our advisors has a terrible story of a printing press and company that he looked after they spent a few hundred thousand a bit of machinery didn't tell the insurer about it claim happened they were like what's this the customer was like we just bought it they were like we never told us about it so we pay out on it um so yeah if we can capture this from your banking data from your accounting platform um and then hopefully in the future if like restaurants have all of these amazing pos data if we can kind of tap into that we can monitor these changes um in real time and say hey seb looks like business is booming what's happened if you're a manufacturing client maybe you got a new cut maybe you got a new contract that you're fulfilling if you're a restaurant maybe something crazy happened great review um so yeah so if we can stay on top of that through the data then that's then that's how we can kind of notice those changes and send that to the businesses.

6:48Jake Wells:Amazing. So is that the vision is to be live in your customers, clients data real time so you can immediately see changes in the business? Ideally, yeah. So yeah, immediately be able to identify and suggest those changes in the businesses. Same with like gaps. If we've got a customer that hasn't had cyber insurance and maybe they're an accounting customer and we, I don't know, get some notification from some of the cyber insurers that these gangs are going after accountancy customers and we can say, hey, look, we noticed that you guys don't have cyber cover and a couple of accountants have been hit for ransomware attacks like I think this is something we should be looking at and kind of notice those gaps as well but yeah definitely the more kind of connected we can get in with their data the better because it also just means we can be proactive and they can just focus on what they're good at and running their business and we can focus on what we're good at which is kind of insurance breaking.

7:33Jake Wells:Yeah got it makes sense and what stage are you at in terms of your product development go to market? Yeah so we're early so we as a broker couldn't do anything really until we were authorized by the FCA so that kind of happened back in towards the start of this year q1 we've got some good customers now so we've got some early customers um in we're into double digits which is good um our main areas of traction have been around our go-to-market um insurer partnerships and our application of ai in terms of our go-to-market we've got two routes one of which we're leveraging more of the agents on and the second bigger one is partnerships um so we're really looking for good good partners to work with on that we've got some amazing ones kind of signed up so far who are kind of submitting business to us which is really good insurers as well so again one of our investors was a strategic investor what we want to do is really nail distribution and then once we've nailed distribution we want to identify where in there is is problem so if we've got a load of manufacturers we go and speak to them my background's products so we go and speak to them because as a broker we're basically distributing products that exist from the insurers but when we can move up that level and say to our insurer partners hey look we've been speaking to our manufacturers and they really think that the times have changed since these policies have been created let's work with them and with us and create amazing products that we can then feed back into our distribution vehicle and then say to our brokers and our sales team go and sell this product to all the manufacturers in the in the uk um so that's good traction with aviva um on that side of things and we've got a couple of early conversations with three other insurers now um for some other products and then finally yeah the ai piece yeah amazing let's can we just touch on that fundraise so that was announced this week it was£950 ,000 and you raised it from Hatch and I think as you said Aviva through Founders Factory can you talk a bit about that process how did you find it?

9:22Fundraising yeah so fundraising was good so we've got some amazing investors Hatch, Exponential Science Foundation and then yeah Aviva through Founders Factory and then some amazing angels the process was good it was kind of first time doing fundraising which was which was fun it's the first time i think i've had a role that's had some level of like rejection to it so that's always interesting you have really good conversations with people there's something they just like ignore you um so that's so that's good but then we yeah we got there in the end we really wanted a blend of people that understood the ai landscape marcel one of the people that came in from um on the hatch side is like a genius when it comes to machine learning there's not a top university i don't think he hasn't been to and got the highest amount possible.

10:05And then we've got strategic investors like Aviva. Again, as we want to move into the actual product building stuff, we've got the biggest insurer in the UK kind of really bought in to our vision and our journey, which is good.

10:18Jake Wells:Amazing, yeah. Fundraising is a very different process, especially from, you know, you and I both have product backgrounds. It's a very different process, speaking to investors, getting rejected, building decks. I wanted to talk about your background. You said you've been working in insurance, but most recently in a product-focused role. You're now the COO of Meshed. Is that right? Yeah. You'll know as bad as anyone. You've got to be very versatile when you're a founder at the early stages. I think the COO job title makes the most sense when you're speaking to insurers in the FCA. So that's where it landed.

10:53I think I was CPO, but then people think I'm like chief people officer. So yeah, so just gone for operations. but anything like any day of the week i'm cpo cfo coo um bit of anything yeah mask jack of all

11:08Jake Wells:trades master of none at the moment how has that product experience changed the way that you're focused or or building meshed um i think it's really really helpful um like with we i try and kind of impasse this learnings on to luca as well our broker so i i've done a lot of broking as well with him so just like actually doing the job and normally you're like as a product person speaking to someone like luca to find out the jobs to be done but now i'm like actually doing them and then working with luca and being like oh yeah it'd be much better if we change this it'd be much better if we did this or yeah if we had document extraction in here actually that'd be much more impactful because i'm spending seven minutes per quote on that um and just like pushing that mindset of like where are you spending the most amount of time doing things um and then what does this look like when we scale and then people are like coming up with good suggestions um so yes i think having that product head is is is good and i'm trying to spend more time doing that because i was actually pulled away from from from a lot of the product stuff we're just general um ad hoc founder stuff just trying to yeah fight fires um i want to talk the 950 000 pounds that you raised do you have a plan or a vision or of how that's going to be spent is that going to be invested in product development expansion growing the team can you give me a bit more on that yeah so it's like it's growing out the team so i think we've got an amazing team now we basically have like an extent like between me mark and vince we can do like the three roles the majority of the roles that need to be done in the business that's why i think we require a strong team to start and then we've hired three people to kind of supplement that so there this money is to pay for um that team we needed to invest some money into our brand so we believe like going forward um with how quick it is to build things i think brand's going to become a really big thing so we want to invest um a bit of time and money into that um and then yeah just giving us a bit of runway like really like we just want to focus on on building um we've got our core staff now and just like keeping them going for the next kind of 18 months um before we next saturdays is going to be it's going to be shown and can we talk about on that on that brand piece what do you think is worth investing in is it your public profiles as founders is it getting a really nice new name or logo what does that kind of brand investment look like i think it's i think it's a combination of the both we're trying to do more on the personal brand stuff as well because we think that's really important at the moment i think you more than anyone kind of embody that right is that building out your own personal um brand so i think that's that's been good also just as a company we're trying to trying to do more in terms of all different types of content educational content like behind the scenes content i think that's really important and also just look and feel um if you're coming out as this new company um and you look a bit like you were made on PowerPoint it's it's trust at the end of the day we're asking businesses that are turning over millions of pounds have tens of staff um to trust us with the protection of their business so we need to look and feel like we are um we are like legit so I think yeah I think it's it's a it's a mindset thing that you really need to to tap into yeah I definitely think that it's becoming increasingly important for all businesses and startups to build that sort of brand moat but also I think when you're when you're working with yeah like established big businesses in a regulated industry is definitely going to yeah definitely going to go a long way if you've got a good brand to to lean back on um and are you just focused on the uk primarily are you looking to across europe as well yeah eyes just on the uk um right now in these first couple years i think the uk market um is big enough there's i think if you look across like the top 50 brokers um in the uk there's a considerable amount doing more than 50 million in revenue um quite a few doing more than 100 million in revenue um in the uk so i think there is a big enough pool here for us to swim in um for now and then yeah i don't know where would be beyond that um and i've done a lot of insurance in america people think oh yeah go and launch america every single state is pretty much different um so it's like you launch state by state um and then europe you've got different markets so i think the netherlands um is quite similar to us in terms of broker landscape um But somewhere like Spain isn't very dominated by bank assurance and stuff like that.

15:14So, yeah, I'd have to really kind of pick our markets carefully.

15:16Jake Wells:Yeah. And what about other use cases? So you're very much focused on, so you said like browser agents and primarily focused on brokers generally. Do you see more use cases for AI within the insurance industry? And do you have a vision to fill those gaps as well? Or do you want to be laser focused on your kind of your core vertical at the moment? Yeah, core vertical simply because that's what we do. when we step into doing our own products then yes we'll look at how can this how can this help the underwriting um piece again it's at the level that we'll be looking at it there's there's a lot of documentation a lot of gathering information so it's how do you speed up that that process of getting information from the underwriter to the broker to the customer and back through that chain um and i think obviously these are language models um and a lot of that is email based off and that is just text and words so yeah how can we speed up those processes i also think claims like at the end of the day you might spend 40 000 pounds on your insurance and at the end of the day you get sent seven pdf documents and a promise that if something goes wrong you're gonna get paid out so when it does come to claim time i think having amazing experiences there am i gonna have voice agents answer the phone when you have a claim absolutely not i worked in high net worth insurance and we had some like really like horrible claims and you need kind of humans and you need that emotional layer there.

16:35But if you go and speak to a claims person, they'll tell you how much of their job is just admin. So it's about looking at their workload. If you break down their week of 35 hours, what's that spending? And if a large majority of that is certain tasks, yeah, exactly. We will be looking to replace and augment their experience. So again, they can spend more time with customers. But also there's keeping customers updated. The amount of times, even just sending an email to a customer saying, there's no update today is an update, but they're not left in the lurch about what's going on. Is my car, where's my van?

17:05Is it being repaired? What's going on? I need this back on the road. So yeah, definitely claims and probably underwriting at some point too.

17:12Jake Wells:Yeah, there's a lot to work on across the whole insurance industry generally. Then the last couple of minutes, I want to ask two more questions. Penultimate one, what's been the biggest mistake that you've made building Meshed? I spent a lot of money on some stiffers right at the start. That would be my biggest mistake. um but um yeah we do have a pothole page where we write down all the things that have gone wrong um but yeah i think we're quite good we're quite fortunate mark's done this before and i've worked in a lot of early stages so when we actually before we set this business we filled our whole pothole pages with things that we've seen gone wrong before so that we don't hit those potholes on this road um so we've been quite cautious i'm a very cautious person i literally have a whiteboard in the corner of my room here that I literally write down our biggest problems and I don't rub them off until it's until it's solved so yeah I would always I might like I'm always trying to look ahead to make sure we're not going to hit and I think but yeah maybe maybe the stickers how much did you spend on them I don't want to say how many did you buy not that many it's just they're made out of paper I'll send you some I'll send everyone some um but no we've got some new ones but yeah that's probably the biggest mistake i've made also to be honest actually i did i i was meant to send something to an insurance partner or worker and i worked on that and i was procrastinating on that and it actually took me too long to send it so that's probably actually a maybe a bigger mistake than yeah okay final question what advice would you give to somebody who is thinking about taking the leap and building their own business um someone literally asked me this question on linkedin yesterday um i i think and i told and i told him just like really like nail down what problem you're trying to solve like you and I as you said are product people it's like ideas are cheap like just just really validate that like is that the best thing there's this amazing Simpsons episode where Homer goes to build he meets his brother and builds a car and the engineers basically just build whatever Homer says um and then you come up with this ugly car and his brother's car company goes bust and that's what kind of happens if you just listen to people about what they want as opposed to like digging and finding out those problems so really kind of try and uncover a problem I spent all of my life and insurance i've seen a lot of problems so i can do it um and then now it's like it's so cheap to to build something i don't expect people to build fully fed products in repli or lovable or whatever um but just try and build something noddy um test it speak to other people um go on reddit find a problem um find a community um and try and build something um small and go from there amazing great advice well look jake thank you so much for joining me let's stay in touch no 100 best luck with building it all.

19:51Wicked. Nice one. Cheers. See you later. Cheers, Jake. Bye. Bye-bye.