BrokerTech Ventures Has Big Plans

A major problem for venture capital accelerators is sorting the wheat from the chaff in backing young businesses: between two-thirds and 90% of startups ultimately fail, according to sources including the Harvard Business Review and Forbes.

However, the story is different for BrokerTech Ventures (BTV): of the 58 companies in the broker-led insurtech accelerator’s five cohorts from 2020 to 2024, 95% are still in business and their valuation has doubled on average, to a collective $1.1 billion. BTV attributes this success to an exacting selection process that features multiple rounds of rankings, ratings, and finalist interviews.

The Des Moines, Iowa-based company will host its sixth cohort in 2025, bringing the total number of companies that have gone through the accelerator to 68. Each insurtech receives $50,000 in seed funding in the form of a simple agreement for future equity, along with guidance from BTV’s team of brokers, wholesalers, and carriers.

For Mike Victorson, BTV’s co-CEO and CEO of M3 Insurance, 2025 is also an opportunity to focus on what he believes is the core value proposition of BTV and its accelerator: the collaboration it fosters between the industry participants and the startups through gatherings like BTV Mania, the annual meeting inaugurating each cohort.

Having that opportunity to meet with brokers, wholesalers, and carriers during BTV Mania often helps the cohort companies develop and refine their product offerings, Victorson explains: “[Startups] come into this accelerator thinking they’re going to solve for A, and they leave solving for B or for C, because of working with our firms. The magic…is the real hands-on work that happens between insurance brokers, insurance companies, and these startup entities.”

As part of the effort to add opportunities for the collaboration Victorson describes, BTV in January 2025 launched the first All Partner Summit.

“Our ownership group has been gathering once a year since the inception of BrokerTech Ventures. A year ago, we made the decision that we needed to broaden our gathering from just the owners to all of our partners,” Victorson explains. “And so, this January, we had somewhere between 70 and 80 people gather in [Arizona] to talk about the industry and the challenges that both brokers and carriers were facing in navigating what’s next in the world of insurtech.”

BTV also plans to launch a new industry event in August of this year, entitled BrokerTech Connect: Chicago. The gathering is planned as a “more intimate” version of InsureTech Connect to enable participants to focus on “broker-specific technology solutions, how they interact with our insurance company partners, and then ultimately, how they can impact the buying and client experience,” according to Victorson. BTV hopes to host between 150 and 200 attendees.

Accelerating Into The Future

BTV’s latest cohort also offers insight into trends in the insurtech startup space. Unsurprisingly, Victorson notes an increased focus on generative artificial intelligence (AI) and next-generation “AI agents”—in particular, on tools that can automate much of the back-end work brokers today handle manually. This could include jobs like translating a submission into an actual quote, comparing different policies from different insurers, or feeding data into the appropriate place in an agency management system so agents can spend more time on winning business instead of rote data entry, says Victorson.

Overall, Victorson has high hopes for this accelerator cohort and for the insurtech space as a whole.

“It’s an exciting time for the industry to think about where value is created and how value is shared with clients,” he says. “The industry seems like it’s on the cusp of releasing human capital and energy to serve customers in our industry, because energy is going to be created, and time is going to be freed up by what insurtech is going to mean for our respective operations. It’s going to help us be bigger, faster, stronger.”