Michael
Witte

Equal Parts, a fifteen-month-old company that acquires independent insurance agencies and then does unglamorous things to them like standardize the workflow and put an AI on the phones, closed a $23M Series A in February 2026. Inspired Capital led. Equal Ventures, Max Ventures, and Genius Ventures came along. The round pushed total acquisition capital to $50M and the company's ambition, stated aloud by the CEO in a press release, to $1B in written premiums inside two years.

The CEO is Mike Witte. He is the reason the check cleared quickly. Before Equal Parts he co-founded RigUp in 2014 with Xuan Yong, ran operations for eight years as COO, took the CEO seat in 2022, and along the way watched the company rename itself Workrise and get valued, at its peak, at roughly $3B. Before that he was a petroleum engineer at Encana. Before that he went to Texas A&M. He picked up an MBA at Columbia somewhere in the middle. This is a resume that, if you squint, describes a person who keeps stumbling into fragmented, human-heavy industries and installing software behind the humans.

Insurance is a fragmented, human-heavy industry. There are a lot of independent agencies in America and a lot of them are run by a person who is going to retire soon and does not want to sell to the private-equity-backed rollup that keeps calling. Witte's pitch, delivered in the same press release, is that half the industry is going to retire in the next decade and someone has to catch the exits. Equal Parts would like to be the catcher's mitt. It has, in the last several months, quietly caught Strategic Insurance in New Mexico and, in what one might call a hometown discount, both Assurely and Lumen Insurance in Austin.

The third path

Witte likes to describe Equal Parts as a third path. Path one, for the aging agency owner, is to sell to a corporate buyer, which typically means the staff gets cut, the client relationships get standardized against a script, and the founder gets a check and a non-compete. Path two is to keep grinding, keep hiring, keep answering the phone at 7pm because Mrs. Henderson's basement flooded. Path three, Equal Parts, is: sell the company, keep the staff, keep the phone number, keep the neighborhood coffee shop meetings, but get a shared operating platform behind you that quotes faster, cross-sells more accurately, and stops losing renewals to Excel.

The unglamorous number that suggests this is not entirely marketing: revenue growth of roughly 40% at acquired agencies, bottom-line improvement of roughly 50%. Those are, admittedly, the company's own figures. They are also, in a category where most acquirers claim the opposite trade-off (we bought your agency, and now it has 20% fewer employees, please clap), an unusual thing to advertise.

Why AI, why now, why here

Most insurance-plus-AI companies are trying to remove the agent. Witte is buying the agent. The Equal Parts platform, according to Inspired's backers and the company's own materials, is a proprietary operating system built to ingest new acquisitions, standardize workflows across them, and compound operational leverage as the network grows. The AI sits behind the human. It quotes. It routes. It reminds. It does not, at least not on the marketing site, answer the phone when Mrs. Henderson calls.

This is a slightly countercultural position for 2026. The consensus in insurtech since roughly 2019 has been that the agent is a legacy cost. Lemonade wanted to remove them. Root wanted to remove them. Most of the neo-brokers wanted to at least reduce the number of humans in the loop. Equal Parts is running the opposite bet: humans are the moat, software is the leverage. Given how the direct-to-consumer insurance thesis has held up in the years since, the contrarian position has aged into a reasonable position.

The Workrise trick, applied again

The story Witte tells about RigUp is that he was working in the energy business, watching labor shortages disrupt oilfield operations, and realized the fix was software - specifically, software that let energy companies find and manage skilled labor on demand. He built the company with Yong out of Austin. It scaled. It renamed. It reached unicorn status. It is, in insurance-analogue terms, the same shape as Equal Parts: fragmented supply, aging workforce, mission-critical service, plausible improvement from a coordination layer.

What Witte appears to have carried over, based on public statements and press coverage of both companies, is the operating discipline. What he has left behind is any illusion that a marketplace with two-sided liquidity is the answer. Equal Parts is not a marketplace. It owns the agencies. It writes the checks. It absorbs the P&Ls. It is closer, in structure, to a private-equity rollup that happens to also ship software - or to a software company that happens to also be a private-equity rollup - depending on which side of the pitch deck you are reading.

The Austin cluster

Two of Equal Parts' first three named acquisitions are Austin agencies. This is either coincidence or an early tell about the geography of insurance tech in 2026. Austin is not, historically, an insurance town. Hartford is an insurance town. Des Moines is an insurance town. Austin is a software town, an energy town, and, increasingly, a place where people who used to build software for one fragmented industry try their hand at buying and modernizing companies in another. Witte is not alone in this migration; he is just further along in it.

Equal Parts was founded in March 2025 by Witte with co-founders Mike Meller and Graham Yennie - a team with, per the company's telling, a mix of insurance-acquisition experience and AI-platform-building experience. They raised a first round of about $10M at launch and a second, larger round the following February. Both were led by investors who tend to sit on the earlier end of the insurance-technology thesis: Inspired for the Series A, Equal Ventures returning for it.

What could go wrong

Rollups have a long history of failing quietly. The math looks great at three agencies and less great at thirty, because integration debt compounds. Equal Parts is betting that its operating platform absorbs that debt - that a new acquisition can be onto the shared stack in weeks, not years, and that the shared stack itself gets better with each addition rather than more brittle. This is the software argument. It is also, historically, the argument every rollup makes.

The other risk is macro. Insurance revenue is a function of premiums, and premiums are a function of a hard market or a soft one. If the market softens materially in 2026 or 2027, Equal Parts' revenue growth number - the 40% figure it likes to cite - could compress independent of anything the company does. Witte's answer, to the extent it has been articulated publicly, is that the operating leverage story is not premium-dependent; the margin lift comes from removing back-office cost. That is a defensible position. It is also, until tested, a claim.

The person

Witte is not a heavy public presence. There is no personal blog cranking out think pieces. There is a LinkedIn account, a handful of press-release quotes, and a March 2025 launch post on the company site titled, with characteristic understatement, "I'm Starting an Insurance Agency." He shows up on the occasional founder podcast to talk about scaling Workrise. He does not, based on the public record, seem particularly interested in becoming a founder-personality. His interest, at least the version of it he chooses to project, is operational.

Which is, incidentally, the right posture for the job he has taken. Selling an insurance agency to Equal Parts is - for the agency owner - a decision about who they trust with the phone number their grandfather printed on a matchbook in 1962. The founder pitching them does not need to be charismatic. He needs to seem like he will not screw it up.

What to watch

The three things to watch in the next twelve months, all publicly stated by the company: the pace of acquisitions against the 25-in-2026 goal; the aggregate premium figure against the $1B-in-24-months goal; and whether the retention numbers at Strategic, Assurely, and Lumen hold up as the acquired agencies transition onto the shared stack. If those three numbers cooperate, the Series A will look, in retrospect, cheap. If they do not, it will look, in retrospect, like a very expensive way to learn that insurance rollups are hard.

Either way, Witte will be in Austin, running the operating platform, doing the same thing he did at Workrise: watching a fragmented industry, adding a coordination layer, and betting that the humans stay in the loop.