Insurance is Slow. Roy Mill is Not.
At any given moment, some insurance carrier somewhere is trying to launch a new product. A team of developers is wrangling a legacy policy administration system. A managing general agent is waiting eighteen months for a technology partner to configure a form. A broker is still submitting applications by fax. Into this industry - stubborn, paper-heavy, structurally resistant to change - Roy Mill has aimed Joshu.
Joshu is a no-code platform that lets insurance carriers and MGAs build, configure, rate, and distribute insurance products digitally, without writing a single line of code. The pitch is blunt: what used to take a year and a half takes weeks. The proof is accumulating. One client, K2 OCONUS, went from zero to a live Defense Base Act insurance program in 45 days. Joshu's "Century Club" - a recognition program for clients who launch in 100 days or less - has become a benchmark that once seemed absurd.
Mill co-founded Joshu in early 2020 with Shimi Bornstein, who serves as CTO. The company is backed by Blumberg Capital, Engineering Capital, Innovation Endeavors, Correlation Ventures, and Sure Ventures. Total funding is $11.7 million, including a Series A in August 2024. The team numbers around 20, split between Menlo Park, California and Tel Aviv, Israel - a split that reflects Mill's biography as much as it reflects engineering economics.
"We started Joshu with a vision to revolutionize how insurance products are made, distributed, and sold - creating an experience that is easy to use, completely self-serviced, and meets the expectations of modern insurers."
- Roy Mill, Co-Founder & CEO, JoshuThe PhD Who Went to Work
Before Joshu, before At-Bay, before Ancestry, there was Stanford. Roy Mill arrived at Stanford's economics department in 2008, four years after graduating from Hebrew University of Jerusalem with a degree in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics. His doctoral advisor was Ran Abramitzky, an economist known for quantitative historical research. Mill finished his PhD in 2013.
He did not go into academia. He joined Ancestry.
The choice reads as eccentric in retrospect - an economist with a Stanford PhD taking a product management job at a genealogy company. But it was a clue about how Mill thinks. Ancestry in 2013 was building out its DNA testing service, turning what had been a database of family trees into a biological product. Mill spent four years there, rising from Senior Product Manager to Director of Product Management, learning how to translate complex data infrastructure into something a consumer would actually use.
In 2017, he moved to At-Bay, a startup building cyber insurance for small and medium businesses. As VP of Product Management, Mill was responsible for building At-Bay's broker portal and its homegrown policy administration system - the core operating infrastructure that lets an insurer quote, bind, and manage policies. He also wrote publicly about what he was building. A series of Medium articles titled "Building a Risk Machine" laid out his thinking about cyber insurance as a data problem, about how pricing and risk assessment could be automated if you designed the information flow correctly.
Those articles read now like a founding document for Joshu. Mill had watched At-Bay build the same infrastructure that every commercial insurer builds - expensively, from scratch, tailored to one company's products. He saw the pattern. Every carrier, every MGA, every insurtech was rebuilding the same plumbing. The question was whether you could generalize it.
"Insurance is one of the last industries where the transaction flow is still largely manual, reliant on email and PDF-based transactions."
- Roy MillBefore All of That: Israel
Mill grew up in Israel. In the late 1980s, he was already tinkering with computers - a self-described early script kiddie, learning by doing in ways that the internet made easy before it made dangerous. He served in the Israeli Defense Forces as an instructor and program manager before leaving for university.
That background - the technical curiosity, the military experience with systems and logistics, the Israeli startup ecosystem - surfaces in how Joshu is built. The engineering function is in Tel Aviv. The company operates across time zones as a structural choice, not an accident.
What Joshu Actually Does
The problem Joshu solves is specific and unglamorous: commercial insurance product development is brutally slow. An insurer who wants to launch a new product - say, a policy for gig workers, or parental leave insurance, or a specialized commercial line - has to build or license a policy administration system, configure rating logic, design application flows, build broker portals, generate documents, and wire up reporting. The process typically takes twelve to eighteen months and requires significant engineering resources.
Joshu's platform replaces that build cycle. Underwriters configure products using Joshu's no-code tools - form builders, automated rating systems, document generators, distribution APIs. Products can be sold direct-to-consumer, through brokers, or embedded in other platforms. The platform also handles the full policy lifecycle: quoting, binding, endorsements, renewals, cancellations, reporting.
In 2024, Joshu added an "Underwriter Desk" feature, which extends the platform's reach into the full lifecycle management of policies after they're sold. The same year, Joshu was named to the InsurTech100, a curated annual list of the 100 most innovative companies transforming insurance globally, chosen from more than 2,100 nominees.
Clients who've launched on Joshu include Parento, which launched parental leave insurance through the platform, and Workforce Insurance Underwriters, which launched two new products in under 100 days. K2 OCONUS' Defense Base Act program - 45 days from start to live - remains a signature case study.
The Lean Principle
Mill's 2023 appearance on the InsureTech Geek podcast was titled "Lean, Insurance & Building Better Products Faster." The title is not accidental. Joshu's operational philosophy draws heavily on lean manufacturing principles: eliminate waste, reduce cycle time, ship and iterate. Applied to insurance product development, this means cutting the long build cycles that make commercial insurance slow to innovate.
This is partly a product philosophy and partly a sales argument. If Joshu can genuinely compress an 18-month product launch into 45 days, the ROI math becomes obvious for any carrier or MGA sitting on product ideas they can't afford to build. The Century Club is a way of making that math visible.
Outside work, Mill plays acoustic guitar, hikes, reads, and listens to podcasts obsessively. He is married to Gili and has three children. He lives in Menlo Park, California.