The insurance claim lives in an awkward place. It arrives after the sales pitch, after the policy documents and usually after something has gone wrong. A dented car, a damaged building, a call nobody wished to make. For the customer, this is the moment the product finally becomes real. For the company, it is a thicket of files, judgment calls, phone conversations and deadlines. CJ Przybyl has spent roughly fifteen years looking at that thicket and seeing an operating system in need of repair.
His career has the pleasing circularity of a good classroom case. He studied optical engineering at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, began in the semiconductor business at Freescale, then earned an MBA at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. While at Booth, a course taught by Lightbank founders Brad Keywell and Eric Lefkofsky kept returning to one of the firm's portfolio companies: BodyShopBids, a consumer marketplace for car-repair estimates.
Przybyl did the impolite and useful thing. He contacted the company and joined it as vice president of strategy. The marketplace had attracted praise, but praise has never met payroll. Consumers needed collision repair infrequently; insurers sat at the center of the transaction every day. After an expensive marketing push, including a Super Bowl commercial that reportedly startled at least one board member mid-beer, the numbers remained stubborn. The company had to change.
A first customer, medium rare
The pivot was assembled from conferences, introductions and tests rather than a single immaculate revelation. BodyShopBids turned its attention toward insurers and became Snapsheet. One early breakthrough involved the president of Gerber Collision & Glass. Over a steak dinner, he agreed to fly to Los Angeles with the young company and vouch for it in a meeting with a large carrier. The carrier took the risk. Snapsheet had its first insurance customer.
This is a particularly useful founder story because nobody emerges as a lone genius. A professor provided the first glimpse, an investor network opened a door, an industry operator lent credibility and a customer agreed to try. Przybyl's contribution was to notice that the original model did not work and argue for one that might. His own account of the period makes flexibility sound less like a virtue on a poster and more like a weekly operating requirement.
“The goal behind starting a company isn't to make your dream company come to life exactly as you always imagined it. The goal behind starting a company is to create something that works and operates on its own, outside of your dreams.”CJ Przybyl, 2018
Snapsheet grew around virtual appraisal. A claimant could photograph vehicle damage, send the images through a phone and receive an estimate without waiting for a field inspection. The larger insight was that the photograph alone solved very little. Claims had to move through communications, estimates, approvals, payments and exceptions. Software could improve the experience only if it understood the procession.
Przybyl helped build Snapsheet Services, then worked on Snapsheet Cloud, a claims-management platform intended to carry a claim from first notice of loss through payment. He led expansion into Canada and Europe. The operation grew into the hundreds of employees, forcing a strategist who once felt uncomfortable on a team of four to learn handbooks, hierarchy and delegation. His summary was refreshingly unornamented: hire good people, trust them, let them try, and guide them when they need it.
Renovate before you innovate
Years before generative AI became an ingredient in every corporate announcement, Przybyl had already formed his complaint about technological theater. Insurance infrastructure was often designed as a database rather than a real-time service system. Adding a clever model to that foundation could make a demonstration sparkle while leaving the claimant's wait untouched.
“A lot of companies want to innovate. But you can't innovate if you haven't renovated your infrastructure.”CJ Przybyl on claims technology
Reserv, founded in 2022 by Przybyl and Martha Dreiling, is the second draft of that argument. It is both a third-party administrator, handling claims for insurers and other organizations, and a software provider. More than 500 adjusters work alongside its platform. The software centralizes claim information, applies explainable AI and lets clients choose how much automation belongs in each workflow. Simpler tasks can move with less intervention. Complex files keep more human judgment.
The financing record sketches how quickly the operation had to mature. An $8 million seed round was followed by a $20 million Series A in 2023. In June 2025, Reserv announced a $25 million Series B led by Flourish Ventures, with participation that included Bain Capital Ventures, Altai Ventures and Accenture Ventures. At that point, the company said it had grown beyond 350 employees in the United States and United Kingdom and had delivered triple-digit year-over-year revenue growth for two consecutive years. It had traveled from an early-stage company into the peculiar middle distance where a founder must keep the product flexible while making the organization dependable.
The distinction matters because a claim is full of facts that refuse to become routine merely because a model has read them. Injury, liability, litigation and repair can converge in a single file. A fast wrong answer remains wrong. Przybyl's public language returns often to the adjuster, a professional who must translate policy into action while talking to people on difficult days. He describes AI as leverage for that person. His preferred future has fewer clerical chores and more attention available for the decisions that deserve it.
The multiplication problem
In May 2026, Reserv announced a $125 million Series C led by KKR, with existing investors Bain Capital Ventures and Flourish Ventures participating alongside strategic partners and clients. The company said annual recurring revenue had reached $100 million. It also attached the financing to a stark operating target: increase annual capacity from 500,000 complex claims to 30 million within four years.
Capital can purchase servers, recruit specialists and cover the bruising expense of growth. It cannot make sixty times the capacity appear by managerial incantation. The real assignment is to turn individual improvements into a system: clean intake, structured data, well-timed communication, sensible escalation, auditable decisions and enough flexibility for clients whose claims operations differ. Przybyl has called this thousands of practical upgrades rather than a silver bullet.
That preference is consistent with his route into the industry. Optical engineering rewards precision. Semiconductor sales requires translation between difficult technology and commercial reality. Insurance claims punish anyone who treats exceptions as a footnote. The combination has produced a founder who speaks fluent AI but remains preoccupied with workflow.
Joins BodyShopBids after encountering the company through a Booth class.
Helps redirect the consumer marketplace toward insurers; Snapsheet emerges.
Co-founds Reserv with Martha Dreiling.
Reserv reports $100 million ARR and raises a $125 million Series C.
The professor returns to class
Przybyl eventually returned to Booth as an adjunct professor of entrepreneurship and entrepreneur in residence. He has advised the Creative Destruction Lab in Wisconsin, the quantum-focused accelerator Duality and the OCA Ventures EDGE fund. He also serves in a board role connected to Rose-Hulman's physics and optical engineering department. It is a broad collection of interests, though the recurring question is familiar: how does a technical idea survive contact with a market?
His teaching role completes a loop. As a Booth student, he found a company through a case discussed in class. When Snapsheet began fundraising, he went back to old course materials. While managing executives, he thought about lessons from psychology. Now his own pivots and scaling pains are teaching material, complete with the expensive advertisement, the empty growth chart and the steak dinner that worked harder than both.
There is humor in the contrast between the industry's current vocabulary and the work itself. “Agentic” systems may sound as if they arrive wearing capes. Claims operations remain resolutely earthbound. Somebody must read the document, return the call, spot the inconsistency and decide what happens next. Reserv's wager is that software can make each of those actions better timed and better informed while leaving consequential judgment with people.
Przybyl has described insurance as a people business and argued that the winners will combine technology thoughtfully with human expertise. The line is easy to applaud. The test will arrive in millions of ordinary moments: a message sent before someone has to ask, an adjuster shown the useful detail rather than another dashboard, a complex file moved quickly without being treated as simple.
His first insurtech company learned that a consumer-facing idea had to follow the transaction upstream. His second is learning how far a carefully designed operation can scale downstream. The machinery behind a claim is rarely visible when it works. Przybyl seems perfectly content with that. An operating system, after all, is successful when people can get on with what they came to do.