The AI-native platform where carriers, MGAs, and brokers build, sell, and run insurance — in one place, without waiting on engineers.
Joshu draws insurance lines as shipping containers, snapped together and loaded by a crane. The least boring picture of a policy administration system you will see this year.
No ticket. No sprint. No six-week wait for a developer who has never read a policy. An underwriter at a managing general agent types a sentence, the rating rule updates, and a broker three time zones away quotes the new product before lunch. This is what Joshu sells: not insurance, but the speed at which insurance can finally move.
Joshu is a software company based in Menlo Park, California. It builds a single platform that lets insurance carriers, MGAs, and wholesale brokers configure products, run underwriting, generate documents, and distribute through branded storefronts. The pitch, distilled to seven words on its homepage: build, sell, and run insurance in one place. The unspoken second half of that sentence is the interesting part - without the engineering department that usually owns all three.
Here is the quiet scandal of commercial insurance: the people who understand the product least often control it most. An underwriter knows exactly which question belongs on an application and which rate should move when a risk changes. But the application lives in a system the underwriter cannot touch. So they file a request. The request joins a queue. The queue is owned by engineers who are, understandably, more interested in the next thing than the last one.
The result is a market that moves at the speed of its IT backlog. Launching a new commercial product could take the better part of a year. Updating one could take a quarter. In a business where pricing and appetite should flex with the world, that lag is not a nuisance - it is the whole problem.
Plenty of legacy systems promised to fix this. Most of them, with the gentle irony the industry has come to expect, simply became the new thing nobody could edit. Joshu's founders had lived inside exactly that gap, and they decided the fix was not a better backlog. It was no backlog at all.
Joshu was founded in 2020 by Roy Mill and Shimi Bornstein. Both came from At-Bay, the cyber-insurance insurtech, where Mill led product management - building broker portals and policy administration systems - and Bornstein founded and ran the R&D team. They had, in other words, personally built the very infrastructure that lets a modern insurer sell online. Then they had watched how painfully every other insurer had to rebuild it from scratch.
Mill is an economist by training who once worked as a product manager at Ancestry.com before spending three years in cyber insurance. Bornstein had worked across storage and cellular-network startups before turning to insurance software. The bet they made together was specific: the capability they built once at At-Bay should not be a custom project for each carrier. It should be a product that any insurance team could pick up and run themselves.
CEO & Co-Founder. Economist, ex-At-Bay VP of Product, ex-Ancestry.com PM. Believes the underwriter should hold the pen.
CTO & Co-Founder. Founded and led At-Bay's R&D team; veteran of storage and cellular-network startups.
At its core, Joshu is a no-code system for building insurance products. Application forms, rating rules, binding requirements, quote and policy documents - all configured by the insurance team directly, no code required. Around that core sit the parts that make a product an actual business: submission intake, underwriting workflows, branded broker storefronts where partners can quote and bind, plus renewals, endorsements, reporting, role-based access, and SSO.
More recently the company moved its front door to joshu.ai and rebuilt the experience around plain language. The promise now is that you describe what you want and the platform configures it - the difference between operating a control panel and simply telling an assistant what to do. The name, it turns out, was a roadmap.
Forms, rating, and binding rules built and updated without writing code - or, increasingly, in plain language.
Branded broker storefronts with quoting and submission built in, plus API-first integrations and webhooks.
Underwriting, renewals, endorsements, reporting, role-based access, and SSO for regulated environments.
Speed is easy to claim and hard to prove, so consider the parts that leave a paper trail. Joshu carries SOC 2 Type II certification, the security bar that regulated insurers actually demand before they will let a vendor near their policies. It was named to the 2024 InsurTech100 list of companies reshaping the industry. And it markets a concrete, falsifiable number: a live insurance product in 100 days or less.
The partnership with AAIS - the American Association of Insurance Services - is the tell. AAIS supplies the trusted, compliance-ready forms that carriers build products on. Joshu supplies the software that ships them. Put plainly: the slow, careful side of insurance handed the fast side a key.
Strip away the platform diagrams and Joshu's mission is almost old-fashioned: let the experts run their own work. The underwriter who knows which question matters should be able to add it. The product owner who sees a gap in the market should be able to fill it this week, not next year. Joshu's whole architecture - no-code core, plain-language authoring, storefronts, APIs - exists to remove the middleman between insurance knowledge and a live insurance product.
It competes in a crowded room. Socotra, Duck Creek, Guidewire, BriteCore, and a dozen newer tools all promise modern insurance software, and every carrier's in-house team quietly believes it could just build the thing itself. Joshu's wager is that "build it yourself" is exactly the trap, and that the winner is whoever makes building unnecessary.
The shield in Joshu's logo stands for the security of insurance; the bars inside it stand for the growth they want customers to feel. The name reaches further back - to Joshu, a Chinese Zen master famous for paradoxes, and to the Japanese word for "helper."
An insurance company named after a riddle and an assistant. It is, at minimum, a more interesting origin story than most policy administration systems can offer.
The world keeps inventing new risks - cyber, climate, embedded coverage sold at the checkout of something else entirely. Each one needs a product, and each product needs to launch before the risk has moved on again. An insurance industry that takes a year to ship is structurally late to its own market. The case for Joshu is not that it is clever. It is that the alternative - waiting - is getting more expensive every quarter.
Skeptics have a fair list. Joshu is a roughly 20-person company in a market full of incumbents with deeper pockets and stickier contracts. No-code platforms can hit ceilings on the most complex programs. And "AI-native" is the kind of phrase that has to earn its keep. Joshu has the SOC 2, the InsurTech100 nod, and the AAIS handshake; it has not yet shown the long roster of marquee carriers that would settle the argument. The bet is live, not won.
Return to that opening scene. The underwriter who changed a rule with a sentence. The broker who quoted it before lunch. A few years ago that sequence took a planning meeting, a ticket, a sprint, and a prayer. If Joshu is right, the remarkable thing about that moment is that nobody in it will find it remarkable at all. The plumbing will have disappeared, which is the highest compliment plumbing can earn - and the whole point of naming a company after an assistant.