A teenager working with rural Indian artisans is an unusual opening for a story about artificial intelligence. It is, however, where Vishal Sankhla’s account of his working life begins. He started a handicraft business, collaborating on custom designs. Years later, he described it as an ongoing family enterprise whose handmade products had found their way into global retail chains, including World Market. Before software entered the picture, there were already things to make, people to work with, and customers to persuade.
The detail changes the scale of the biography. Uber and Meta occupy plenty of space on Sankhla’s résumé, as they would on anyone’s. Yet his first reported venture belonged to a world of physical goods and individual makers. It gives the career a beginning beyond the familiar procession of university, technology job, venture capital. The family business kept going while he pursued another kind of building.
Today he is co-founder and chief executive of Outmarket AI, working with Anshu Jain on software for insurance agencies. The goods have changed considerably. So has the distribution. The recurring commercial question remains wonderfully plain: what can you make that another person will find useful enough to keep using? Insurance offers a particularly exacting audience for the answer.
An engineer meets another kind of paperwork
Sankhla studied electronics engineering at Birla Vishwakarma Mahavidyalaya before completing a master’s in electrical engineering at the University of Southern California. His LinkedIn education dates run from 2001 to 2004. An academic record gives his master’s thesis a rather less conversational title: “Establishing Security Associations using Small Worlds of Trust in Ad Hoc Networks.” Ahmed Helmy supervised the work with Clifford Neuman.
It is a reminder of how much engineering lies underneath a later title such as CEO. Networks, security, and the movement of information were subjects of study long before insurance documents became his business. His early professional career included Network Chemistry and Cisco. He subsequently co-founded Viralheat with Raj Kadam, taking responsibility for its technology.
Building in the United States also meant dealing with an institution that could complicate every business plan: the immigration system. In 2013, he spoke publicly about the uncertainty of temporary visa status. “It’s a constant distraction,” he said. The concern reached beyond his own permission to stay. Hiring and retaining other foreign-born engineers brought legal costs and uncertainty into the company’s operations.
At the time, Sankhla described assembling more than a thousand pages documenting his accomplishments for his green card application. A founder could be creating jobs and still spend extraordinary effort establishing his right to remain where those jobs existed. The paperwork in this chapter was personal, consequential, and impossible to delegate entirely to ambition.
Small worlds. Networks. Trust.
The subjects of Sankhla’s USC master’s thesis, long before Outmarket.Social media needed a less crowded desk
Viralheat worked on a problem that now sounds like an earlier edition of Sankhla’s current one. Businesses were trying to understand conversations scattered across social networks. Keeping up required monitoring, analysis, publishing, and responding, often through separate tools. A company could hear its customers in several places and still struggle to form one usable picture.
By February 2013, Viralheat was introducing Smart Stream, a dashboard that brought material from networks including Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and YouTube into a shared working environment. Users could filter streams, compare activity, and reply or engage from the interface. Sankhla explained that the business had begun with monitoring and listening; customer requests pushed it toward analytics and a broader set of tasks.
The useful historical point is the expansion from seeing information to doing something with it. A brand manager needed to respond to a customer, rather than admire a chart of the customer’s dissatisfaction. Even an attractive dashboard has limited consoling powers when somebody is waiting for an answer.
In March 2015, Cision acquired Viralheat. Its employees joined the larger company, with Sankhla, Kadam, and chief executive Jeff Revoy entering senior management. Cision planned to make the technology available first in the United States, then extend availability into Canada and several European markets. For Sankhla, a product built with a co-founder had become part of a much larger communications business.
- 2015Viralheat → Cision
- 2017Uber
- 2019Meta
- 2021Ethos
- 2023Outmarket
The route back to a small office
After Cision came operating roles at Uber, Meta, and Ethos. At Uber, Sankhla led product for the core platform. At Meta, he was a director of engineering and worked on advertising products. At Ethos, he led product, working on consumer and agent distribution. The succession brought experience of both building companies and working inside organizations whose products already served large audiences.
Ethos supplied the encounters that would lead to Outmarket. In his account, developing the business involved speaking with more than a hundred independent agents. He and Jain describe visits to kitchen tables, strip mall offices, and agencies that had passed through generations. The settings matter. Understanding an agency required leaving behind the convenience of imagining one from a technology company’s office.
There they found people moving information between documents and systems, checking details, and repeating work. Their expertise was valuable; the way it had to travel could be painfully cumbersome. Sankhla’s later argument about insurance technology grew out of that observation: experienced professionals had good reasons to demand tools that fitted their actual day.
Jain brought a complementary technical background, including natural language technologies, machine learning, IBM Research, Meta, and Ethos. Their partnership joined product and engineering experience with direct exposure to insurance distribution. Outmarket began in 2023. TTV Capital made its first investment that year, when, the investor says, the founders had a concept but neither an incorporated company nor a product.
A good answer still leaves a job to do
The first version of the idea was a natural language question-and-answer experience for insurance data. Users could interrogate information held in both structured records and unstructured documents. Sankhla describes a practical discovery in that early work: people needed help completing the next task, too. Finding the answer was only one part of an agency’s working day.
Outmarket expanded into quote comparison, policy review, proposal generation, and searching for suitable insurance markets. The sequence is revealing. Start with a question about a document; follow the user into the decision or deliverable that made the question necessary. An answer that creates another afternoon of copying and pasting has left a considerable amount of the job untouched.
The company connects with agency management systems, bringing its tools into the places where account information already lives. In a February 2026 podcast conversation with Josh Hollander, Sankhla discussed fragmented data, manual handoffs, policy intelligence, servicing, and renewals. The conversation also addressed how to measure the work: cycle time, errors, and business outcomes.
That emphasis makes his public account of AI unusually occupational. The unit of interest is a task someone must finish. In another podcast appearance, with Profiles in Risk, the product was described around a simple design principle: allowing brokers to keep their existing processes while completing administrative work faster. The customer’s habits are part of the engineering brief.
“Teams also needed a better way to act on that data.”
Vishal Sankhla · on Outmarket’s early product development
A simplified illustration of the workflows Outmarket describes.
Four months between the rounds
Outmarket launched publicly with a $4.7 million seed round in March 2025, led by Fika Ventures with TTV Capital and Dash Fund participating. In May 2026, a $17 million Series A followed, led by Permanent Capital Ventures. These are company financing events, but they also mark Sankhla’s return to the role of founder after years in larger technology organizations.
The next announcement arrived quickly. In September 2026, Outmarket announced a $34.5 million Series B led by SignalFire, with Fika Ventures, Permanent Capital Ventures, TTV Capital, and Dash Fund participating. The founders said they had not expected to raise again so soon. They attributed the timing to agencies adopting the product and existing customers expanding its use across teams and workflows.
At that announcement, the company reported more than 300 agencies and over 10,000 users, including more than a quarter of the top 100 US brokers. Those figures describe the company’s reported adoption at a particular moment. Alongside the money came a very specific addition to the product: Certificate Hub, designed for the certificates of insurance agencies issue for their clients.
The workflow reads a contract or lease, identifies insurance requirements, compares them with the account’s policies, flags gaps, and helps prepare the appropriate certificate. It is an almost comically unglamorous companion to a venture funding announcement. It is also faithful to the business Sankhla has chosen. A completed form, with the correct details, can matter rather more to its recipient than a speech about the future.
Announced funding · USD millions · bars share a zero baseline
Adoption figures reported by Outmarket in September 2026.
The next customer conversation
Sankhla’s stated ambition is to connect insurance data, insights, and workflows across the industry. The company’s September announcement included plans to begin extending capabilities to carriers later in the year. In October, Outmarket also appeared among the supporting partners of the Big “I” Agents Council for Technology. Building the software increasingly involves working with the institutions around its users.
His public writing distinguishes AI built for a particular industry from general-purpose tools, concentrating on accuracy, workflow, and trust. His relationship with Section adds another thread: the education company lists him among its advisers and describes his involvement in advising and investing in startups. The engineering career has expanded into helping other people build and learn.
There is an appealingly ordinary standard beneath all the technical vocabulary. A broker should have time to talk to a client. An account manager should be able to finish a proposal. A producer should be able to use the knowledge already inside an agency. These are the working outcomes Outmarket promises to improve, and the outcomes against which its growing scope will be judged.
The handicraft business offers a modest closing perspective. According to Sankhla, that enterprise endured as a family operation while his own career moved through networks, social media, large technology companies, and insurance software. It provides a different measure of a venture’s life: people continuing to make something that customers continue to buy. For all the distance between an artisan’s design and an insurance workflow, continued usefulness is a demanding thing to build.