Insurtech NY

InsurTech NY was co-founded by Tony Lew and David Gritz, who both serve as managing directors and run the platform and the fund together. Their positioning is access rather than capital: the organisation's value to a management team is the carrier and broker relationships it can convene, and the fund is the mechanism for taking a position in companies that emerge from that funnel.

The investment side is led by Sokhiba Mukhitdinova as investment principal, with Vanessa Fajardo as investment analyst and Julia Ju as research analyst. Aaron Caton manages the innovation programme that connects carriers and brokers to startups, Tyrel McAllister works as market strategist, Eliza Victorio as operations analyst and Roi Hansraj as strategic advisor. The firm also carries a venture partner bench of Tarun Chopra, Ting Lin and Isaac Espinoza, extending underwriting capacity into specific insurance sub-sectors. The team works from 895 Broadway in Manhattan.

InsurTech NY was founded in 2019 as a convening platform for carriers, brokers, investors and insurance technology companies, and the investment vehicle came later, as one output of that network. The InsurTech Fund invests in North American insurtechs, explicitly leveraging InsurTech NY's own deal sourcing and programme flow, and takes positions through convertible notes or equity with the stated aim of supporting companies from seed through Series A. No fund size is published and no Reg D offering amount is disclosed under the InsurTech NY name.

The fund's underwriting criteria are set out publicly and read more like a corporate innovation screen than a venture memo: the solution must address a clear problem or create clear advantage in insurance, the team must be capable of executing it, the company must have a live product with demonstrable traction and a clear path to client acquisition and revenue, the business model must be scalable, and there must be a clear liquidity event for the fund. The firm also states a commitment to supporting diversity among the management teams it backs. It sits alongside InsurTech NY's conference, corporate innovation programme, competition, accelerator and MGA Lab.