Briza sells one API. On the other side of that API is a commercial insurance industry that spent a century deciding it did not need an API. Rishi Sharma is the CEO of the company holding both ends of that argument.
The API quotes a small-business policy. It binds one. It handles payment. It supports business owner's policies, general liability, workers' comp, cyber, and a lengthening list of lines that used to require a broker to email a submission and wait. If you were a software company that wanted to sell a landscaping SaaS with a general liability policy bolted onto the signup flow, Briza is the wire.
Sharma is the person in charge of keeping that wire from melting.
01What He Actually Runs
Briza is a Toronto-based insurtech founded in 2016 by Ben Munro and Mike McDerment, the FreshBooks co-founder. It raised $3M CAD in early 2020 and $10.2M CAD in a Battery Ventures-led Series A that October. Its pitch: a neutral API layer that connects commercial insurance carriers and MGAs to the developers and agencies who want to sell their products.
Sharma joined in 2018 as head of product and CTO. In December 2022, Munro stepped down and Sharma was named CEO. In the same window, the company let go of roughly 26 employees, about half of the headcount at the time. The industry press covered the layoffs. Sharma, per the reporting, did not comment.
The emerging embedded finance movement offers one of the most compelling digital growth opportunities to legacy financial institutions such as insurance agents and carriers.Rishi Sharma - on Briza's Series A, 2020
You can read that quote two ways. One is the standard fintech talking point, which is that every SaaS company will eventually sell a financial product embedded in its user flow. The other reading, which is the interesting one, is that commercial insurance is a legacy industry that has already decided embedded distribution is inevitable and is trying to figure out who owns the pipes. Briza would like to own the pipes.
02The Stack, Because He Wrote About It
In January 2020, Sharma published a LinkedIn post titled, without adornment, "Briza's technology stack." Most engineering blogs of that period were operating in the mode of Ken Burns documentary. Sharma's is basically a menu. It contains the sentence, "Briza prides itself on being able to write quality software fast," which is the kind of thing that reads like corporate boilerplate until you notice it is doing all the work in the paragraph.
Briza · The stack, per Rishi
The interesting thing about this list is what it is not. It is not exotic. There are no bespoke event buses, no vector-database party tricks, no in-house orchestration frameworks. It is boring in the way that infrastructure sold to insurance carriers has to be boring: legible under audit, cheap to hire for, easy to observe when a Fortune 500 carrier's underwriting question is timing out at 2 a.m. Sharma seems to have picked the stack a compliance officer would pick if a compliance officer had to hire the team.
03Before Briza
Sharma spent roughly 13 years shipping product before Briza. The bulk of it is at FreshBooks between 2014 and 2018, where he was a software engineering leader and worked on the FreshBooks redesign, the version of the accounting SaaS that eventually reached tens of millions of small businesses. Before FreshBooks, he had stops in financial services and at FlashStock, a community-sourced content network for Fortune 500 brands, which is a category description that has aged worse than his career.
FreshBooks matters here for two reasons. First, it is a small-business software company, which is close enough to Briza's target user that the pattern-matching is useful. Second, Briza's co-founder Mike McDerment is also the FreshBooks co-founder. Sharma showed up at an insurtech run by his former CEO. That is not scandal. It is how small tech networks recycle their operators.
Briza prides itself on being able to write quality software fast.Rishi Sharma - "Briza's technology stack," 2020
04The Promotion No One Wants
Being handed a CEO title on the day your co-founder resigns and half the team gets a Friday email is, empirically, the worst kind of promotion. It is also increasingly common in venture-backed insurtech. Sharma took it. He did not go on the podcast circuit to explain it. He did not, in the reporting, respond to press inquiries about the transition.
The silence is characteristic. Sharma's public writing tends to be short, technical, and confident. His public speaking, insofar as it exists, tends to be in interviews about product architecture. His LinkedIn photo is unremarkable. His handle is rishi-o, not rishi-sharma, which reads like a person who registered LinkedIn before self-promotion was in fashion.
05The Reading List
In December 2020, Sharma published a short LinkedIn essay on "The Boron Letters," the collected marketing correspondence Gary Halbert wrote to his son from federal prison. It is a book beloved by direct-response copywriters and viewed with mild bewilderment by most CTOs. That Sharma read it, wrote about it, and posted about it during the year Briza raised its Series A is a small tell. He is running an API business, but he seems to think about selling.
Which brings us back to the pitch. Selling an API into an industry that runs on relationships is a marketing problem as much as an engineering problem. Sharma appears to know this. He has said, publicly and repeatedly, that Briza's job is to translate the quote-bind-pay experience into something a developer can consume. That translation is not free. Someone has to convince the carrier that the endpoint is legitimate, that the SOC 2 report is real, that the small business showing up in a signup flow is the same small business a broker would have written by hand.
06The Job From Here
The state of the commercial insurance API market in 2026 is that carriers have mostly agreed digital distribution is inevitable and have mostly not agreed on how to expose it. Every major carrier has a partial answer. Every MGA has an appetite. Every SaaS company sitting on a small-business user base has, at some point in the last three years, been pitched embedded insurance by someone who used the phrase "flywheel."
Briza's answer, and Sharma's job, is to be the abstraction layer that makes those partial answers behave like one product. That means signing carrier deals. It means keeping uptime up. It means running SOC 2 without letting the security posture eat the roadmap. It means telling a developer audience that a REST endpoint for BOP quoting exists and is not a lie. And it means, quietly, running a company that was cut in half and asked to keep growing.
He seems suited to the assignment. He has spent his career shipping software into industries that do not think of themselves as software industries. He writes about tech stacks like a person who does not need to romanticize them. His most-quoted line is six words long. His reading list includes a book about how to sell things, which is more than most engineers who become CEOs can say.
Whether Briza wins is a question about the carrier market, the timing of embedded insurance adoption, and the price of capital. Whether Sharma is the right operator for it is a narrower question. On the evidence, he is a builder who took the job when the building got hard.
He came up through software, not insurance. That is either the pitch or the risk, and at Briza it is both.Filed from the internet