Mike Witte's second act begins with a familiar inconvenience: people who know their customers very well, spending too much of their day wrestling with everything else. He encountered that problem in oil and gas. Now he sees it in independent insurance agencies. The industries have different vocabulary, different paperwork, different reasons for picking up the phone. Witte is betting that the work underneath them has enough in common to make his first decade of company building useful all over again.
He co-founded RigUp, which became Workrise, and is now co-founder and CEO of Equal Parts in Austin. His new company buys agencies and connects them to shared operating infrastructure. The premise has a pleasantly unfashionable center: the local agent's relationships are worth keeping. A business can acquire better software rather more quickly than it can acquire twenty years of being the person a customer calls.
A book, a resignation, and a move to Austin
Witte began his career as a petroleum engineer at Encana, later working in energy private equity consulting. He graduated from Texas A&M and earned an MBA at Columbia Business School. The move into business school was less orderly than those credentials make it sound. He has recalled reading a book, deciding he wanted to build something himself, quitting his job, and applying without much understanding of what business school involved.
“I had no idea what I was doing,” he said of that decision. It is an unusually useful line in a founder's origin story. It leaves room for the actual education that followed, including the education no university can put on a transcript.
While at Columbia, Witte met Xuan Yong, another Texas A&M graduate. Yong brought financial experience; Witte concentrated on product and strategy. Their seed financing closed on Witte's graduation day in 2014. Yong married a week later. The pair left New York for Austin. Some people mark graduation with a long lunch. Witte's schedule appears to have been somewhat less leisurely.
The customers edited the business plan
RigUp launched in 2014 with a marketplace idea: help energy companies find and hire vendors and workers. The founders' account of its early development contains an awkward detail for anyone who imagines a startup moving neatly from vision to execution. The technology worked, but the original offering struggled to get traction.
Individual workers, however, were using it to show their experience and find assignments. Matching those workers with jobs was the part that kept getting a response. The company followed that behavior, developing a workforce business that also helped people get paid on time and find their next project.
By February 2021, RigUp had become Workrise. The new name accompanied ambitions beyond oil and gas, including other energy and infrastructure trades. That change records a lesson about attention. The founders had started with an idea about how transactions ought to work. The workers showed them where the immediate value was.
A reported $2.9 billion valuation followed a $300 million funding round in May 2021. Witte eventually became CEO. In March 2024, Workrise announced Mick Hollison as its next chief executive, with Witte remaining on the board. A company that began with two founders had become an organization substantial enough to require a different chapter of leadership.
Success leaves homework
Witte's explanation for starting Equal Parts is strikingly concerned with what he would change. His reflection on RigUp identifies three practical lessons: acquire earlier, avoid building every tool yourself, and bring experienced industry operators into the company alongside people eager to innovate.
Early traction had involved a circular problem. Credibility helped secure meetings; meetings helped establish credibility. Good pilot partners helped improve the product; a better product attracted pilot partners. During RigUp's growth, Witte completed more than fifteen acquisitions. In retrospect, he believed buying businesses with established relationships could have shortened the initial struggle.
He also reconsidered the cost of proprietary tooling. Building software carried continuing maintenance obligations as well as the initial expense. With more capable third-party tools available, his second company could concentrate its development effort more selectively.
The cultural lesson may be the most revealing. He remembered being among the technology newcomers trying to change an established industry. Equal Parts would need veterans whose experience gave the newcomers' ideas somewhere practical to land. His critique of his first venture is therefore also a hiring brief for his second: experience should have a seat at the table from the beginning.
“It's about people... I need people that want to keep running, that are excited, motivated.”Mike Witte, July 2025
First, get in the truck
Before the acquisitions came the conversations. Witte has described putting down his computer, getting into his truck, and visiting agency owners. He asked questions and listened. The businesses he found had local trust and customers they had served for decades, alongside the limitations of operating at a small scale.
His description of insurance as an “operator's paradise” gives away what interested him. He saw recurring demand, fragmentation, and economics that could improve as agencies brought more business together. He also saw owners whose companies mattered to their communities. The opportunity had both a spreadsheet and a front door.
Equal Ventures knew Witte before this venture; its investment announcement described a relationship stretching back to business school. The firm highlighted the months he spent meeting owners while developing the plan. That preparation helps explain the continuity between the two companies. He was changing industries while repeating the habit of learning from the people already doing the work.
Equal Parts launched in March 2025 with $10 million in acquisition capital, backed by Equal Ventures and Max Ventures. His co-founders were Mike Meller and Graham Yennie, combining acquisition and operating experience with expertise in AI and machine learning. Their task was to turn those owner conversations into a business that could keep its promises after a deal closed.
The plumbing behind a personal business
By February 2026, Witte had revised his diagnosis of the industry. He had arrived expecting a technology problem and come to see a connectivity problem. Insurers, agency management systems, customer databases, and intake tools did not connect cleanly. People filled the gaps.
That distinction matters to his operating model. An agency can buy another application and still leave someone moving information between screens. Equal Parts aims to standardize workflows and automate repetitive administration across acquired businesses, making the connections part of a shared system.
“Just go spend time with your customers,” was how Witte described the offer to one owner who wanted to sell without stopping work. The appeal is easy to understand. A person who has spent years building a business may welcome a smaller administrative burden without welcoming a smaller role in customers' lives.
His June 2025 writing on automation was similarly practical: begin with one process, consider document handling, measure time returned to relationships, and prioritize connectivity when selecting partners. Those are modest units of progress for a founder pursuing a large market. They also make his argument testable in an ordinary working day.
An offer can be good and still feel wrong
One of Witte's favorite early memories involves an email from Benito Ortiz, founder of Strategic Insurance Group in Albuquerque. As Witte recounts it, Ortiz had three financially attractive private equity offers, but found them uninspiring. After their conversations, Ortiz took his agency off the market to wait for an opportunity with Equal Parts.
The anecdote gives Witte's relationship argument a specific person and a specific decision. A purchase price answers one question. The future of a team, a customer base, and a founder's working life supplies several more.
Lumen Insurance in Austin was an early acquisition, followed by Assurely and Strategic Insurance. Witte has also acknowledged friction around carrier access: smaller agencies have less volume and fewer options, and Equal Parts has sometimes used wholesalers and aggregators while developing stronger carrier relationships. His platform still has to earn advantages through operating experience and scale. The thesis does not exempt it from the industry's daily constraints.
Ownership is part of the culture plan
The addition of D3 Insurance brought another version of partnership into the story. Its four founders, Rex Young, Stephanie Musick, Dustin Webb, and Brock Sherwood, had more than seventy-five years of insurance experience between them. The agency was built around four partners with different strengths.
Equal Parts used that acquisition to articulate its own cultural approach: people building the company should own part of it. Shared equity was presented as a way to align responsibility and upside across teams that arrived with different histories. Buying an agency brings a whole group of people into a company at once. There is no convenient opportunity to interview the culture into uniformity.
Its operating system, Ultron, is intended to connect those agencies through centralized workflows and data. The name sounds ready for a film trailer; the work includes servicing and legacy software migration. Even a dramatic name eventually has to deal with administration.
Series A led by Inspired Capital
TOTAL ACQUISITION CAPITAL ANNOUNCED$50 millionIncluding investors and lending partners
The next chapter has truck routes
In February 2026, Equal Parts announced its Series A and plans to acquire twenty-five agencies during the year and reach $1 billion in premiums within twenty-four months. Those were targets. Premium volume describes the insurance business flowing through a network; it is distinct from the agency's revenue and from a founder's personal wealth.
September brought more concrete developments. Equal Parts publicly announced ProSource Insurance Agency in Plano, Texas, a transportation specialist whose acquisition had closed in the first quarter. President Paul Nhem founded it in 2003. Its expertise includes the different needs of trucking companies, owner-operators, and commercial fleets. That is the kind of knowledge Witte wants to bring into the network already formed.
The company also announced Independence Insurance Agency in Miramar, Florida, founded by co-presidents Aaron Hollander and Luis Reyes. Connecting transportation specialists across states gives his shared-infrastructure idea a particular field of application. The work involves businesses with drivers, cargo, equipment, and distinct operating demands. Local expertise remains part of the product.
Witte's story now circles back to the people who first made his marketplace useful. At Workrise, workers helped reveal what the business should become. At Equal Parts, agency owners are being asked to help shape what comes next. He has brought a decade of experience to the second attempt, including a willingness to revise his diagnosis. The next test is ordinary and demanding: after the acquisition announcement, can the person customers trust get on with the job?