Irys, a Tampa‑based insurtech, has closed a $12.5 million seed round led by Markd, with backing from Deepwork Capital, Florida Opportunity Fund, Ansay & Associates, HICO Ventures, and JMG Capital. The new capital will accelerate engineering hiring, deployment of its platform across U.S. and Canadian markets, and further integrations with distribution partners.
At the heart of Irys’s pitch is an AI‑native, integration‑agnostic operating system built to replace the patchwork of legacy platforms that still underpin much of insurance. According to Margeaux Giles, CEO of Irys, “For 15 years I ran agencies on tech that didn’t care if it was usable … the industry’s been trapped in contracts, broken platforms, and empty promises. … Irys is how we fix that.” The platform aims to unify finance, operations, sales, and client data in real time, streamlining workflows and automating across modules.
Already, Irys supports brokerages and MGAs representing nearly $1 billion in active written premium, and the company is launching “cohort” pilots for frictionless, no‑data‑migration onboarding. Parker Beauchamp, Managing Partner at Markd, framed Irys as more than just another agency management system: “It runs CRM, analytics, accounting, tasks, and document management, all in one place. It’s the infrastructure that works.”
Editorial Viewpoint & Market Outlook
The insurance industry is at an inflection point. For years, distribution firms have been burdened by technical debt—legacy systems that lack agility, data silos, and costly integrations. What Irys is proposing isn’t incremental improvement; it is a re‑architecting of the stack under the belief that intelligent core infrastructure can itself be a competitive moat.
That said, execution risk is steep. Replacing entrenched systems in brokerages and MGAs—even one module at a time—is notoriously fraught with resistance, migration cost, and change management. Irys’s “no‑data‑migration” onboarding promise may prove a key differentiator, if it works as smoothly in real world settings as it does in pilot environments.
If Irys succeeds, its addressable market is enormous—not just in agencies and MGAs, but eventually in carriers that want more nimble ops, embedded insurance flows, and AI-powered risk engines. For now, the spotlight will be on whether this fresh capital can turn vision into traction—and whether insurers and brokers are ready to swap decades of legacy tech for a new, unified backbone.
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