The Insurance Broker That Turned Itself Into an API

Most insurtech startups of the last decade set out to kill the insurance broker. Mylo did close to the opposite. It took the playbook of Lockton - the world's largest independent broker - and turned it into software, then started selling that software to everyone else. Ten years on, the company that began as an idea inside a giant is now a quiet layer of insurance plumbing running behind accounting apps, website builders and small-business marketplaces you may already use.

The pitch is deceptively plain. Insurance is something people want handled, not something they want to shop for. So Mylo built an engine that reads a customer's situation, recommends the right coverage from more than 100 carriers, and quotes a policy that balances price against protection - then hands the person to a licensed advisor to finish the job. It sells that experience directly at ChooseMylo.com, and, increasingly, it rents the whole machine to partner companies who want to offer insurance without becoming an insurance agency.

01 / ORIGINThe startup that hid inside a broker

Mylo launched in 2015 within Lockton Companies, drawing on more than 50 years of the broker's expertise and carrier relationships. For a young insurance venture, that parentage solved the two hardest problems at once: credibility with carriers and a deep bench of domain knowledge. The trade-off was independence. Mylo spent its first eight years growing inside someone else's house.

The founder is David Embry, a CEO with a resume that reads more finance than software. He was previously President of SelectQuote Benefit Solutions and a Managing Director at J.P. Morgan before starting Mylo. His thesis has stayed consistent: small businesses and everyday consumers are underserved by insurance not because products are missing, but because the buying process is miserable. Fix the process and you win the customer.

In 2018, Guggenheim Partners came in as a minority investor, and in January 2019 Mylo announced a $28 million funding round to expand its platform and carrier network. Then, in 2023, the venture finally walked out the front door: Mylo became an independent company backed by global insurtech investor Group 1001. Independence came with a sharper strategy - lean into embedding.

02 / PRODUCTInside the "Mind of Mylo"

The core of the company is a recommendation engine Mylo calls, with a straight face, the Mind of Mylo. It is patent-pending, and it does more than a rate comparison. It classifies a business or an individual, matches them to appropriate coverage across its carrier network, orchestrates the questions so customers are not asked the same thing twice, and quotes policies chosen for the best combination of coverage and price. Speed is part of the promise: Mylo reports that for personal-lines inquiries, 87% of customers get a first outreach within two minutes.

Since going independent, Mylo has packaged that stack as a product called Amplifi - the platform partners integrate to drop guided insurance shopping into their own apps. The distinction matters. A rate-comparison site shows you a list. Mylo's engine makes a recommendation, and a licensed human stands behind it.

03 / MODELHow Mylo actually makes money

Mylo is a broker, not a carrier. It does not underwrite risk or hold policies on a balance sheet; it earns commissions from carriers on the coverage it places. Revenue comes from two motions running side by side. The first is direct-to-consumer, where people arrive at Mylo's own site and buy. The second - and the one the company is betting on - is embedded distribution, where a partner integrates Amplifi and Mylo handles the quoting, advice and binding behind the partner's brand.

That choice - to stay a programmable broker rather than become a carrier - is the most interesting thing about the company. It sidesteps the underwriting losses that sank several flashier insurtechs during the 2021-2022 boom-and-bust, and it turns Mylo's biggest constraint (it needs distribution) into a product (it sells distribution).

04 / CUSTOMERSWho is actually using it

On the direct side, the customers are individuals and small business owners - the sign shop, the accountant, the franchise operator - who need coverage but do not have a risk manager on staff. On the embedded side, the "customer" is often another company. Mylo reports serving through 60-plus channel partners, and the named list is a good map of where small businesses actually spend their time.

1-800Accountant selected Mylo to give its network of 200,000-plus small businesses a guided insurance experience. Website builder UENI embeds Mylo for the entrepreneurs building their online storefronts. The small-business marketplace NEWITY named Mylo its exclusive insurance partner. And through Group 1001, Mylo powers Gainbridge Protect, dropping guided auto and home insurance into the Gainbridge platform.

05 / MARKETWhere Mylo sits among the rest

The small-business digital insurance market splits roughly into camps. There are digital BOP platforms built for speed - Next Insurance, CoverWallet, Hiscox Direct - that bind small standard policies in minutes. There are broker-augmented platforms - Embroker, Insureon, Simply Business - that pair online quoting with human review for messier risks. Mylo lands closer to the second group, but with a twist: it does not just serve its own funnel, it hands the engine to partners so the insurance shows up inside other products entirely.

That is the harder path to explain in a headline and, arguably, the more durable one. Owning a checkout funnel is a race that gets more expensive every year. Being the insurance feature a hundred other platforms would rather rent than build is a quieter, stickier position.

06 / RECORDTen years, quietly

Mylo hit its 10-year anniversary in 2025, a rare milestone in a category littered with three-year flameouts. Along the way it has collected the trade recognition that comes with staying power: it was named "Best InsurTech Company" in the FinTech Breakthrough Awards for a third consecutive year, landed on Forbes' "America's Best Startup Employers," and appeared on CNBC's World's Top InsurTech Companies and FinTech Global's InsurTech100. Company leaders have described the business as growing around 30% a year.

07 / TAKEAWAYWhat a builder can copy

The transferable lesson is not "start an insurance company." It is a positioning move. If you are building a platform for small businesses, insurance is the feature you keep punting on because the regulation is a nightmare and the licensing is worse. Mylo's entire company is the answer to that punt - it built the hard, licensed, carrier-connected part once, and now lets others embed it. The pattern generalizes: find the compliance-heavy feature everyone avoids, build it properly, and rent it.

Where it would not work: the model needs distribution partners who trust you with their customers, and it needs carrier relationships that take years to earn. Mylo had a decade inside Lockton to build both. A cold-start version of this - no carrier trust, no partner pipeline - is a much steeper climb. The moat here is boring and slow, which is exactly why it holds.