AI Meets a $2T High-Trust Industry: How Newfront CEO Made It Work
Published August 29, 2025
August 2025 – Spike Lipkin, CEO and co-founder of Newfront, recently joined Wade Foster, CEO and co-founder of Zapier, on the Agents of Scale podcast to discuss transforming the insurance industry with a tech-first perspective and Newfront’s take on new AI tools. Read on for a sneak peek at what their conversation covered.
On How Technology Is at the Core of Newfront
Early in his career, Lipkin worked for a startup where he saw how broken insurance was from the client perspective. “The experience was terrible,” he said. “It's mountains of paperwork. It's incredibly confusing.” Worse, his tech-forward company had to regress to pen-and-paper processes and emailed PDFs. He realized that “this marketplace has the opportunity to digitize.”
That approach has paid off. Today, Newfront transacts about $3 billion of premium annually and works with one in five unicorns. “We win by combining experts—people who go really deep into various verticals of insurance—with software and, increasingly, with AI to bring about a better client experience,” he said.
On How Newfront’s Agentic AI Saves Clients Time
Lipkin spoke about two agentic AI products built by Newfront. The first is Benji, which answers employees’ benefits questions, shifting that work off of HR. “We save HR teams about a month a year,” he said. With Contract Review, clients can upload contracts to get immediate answers on whether they comply with insurance programs. “In this case, you’re providing this experience that feels almost magical,” Lipkin said. “If you’re a client, you’re used to sending off a contract, maybe getting a response hours later. Now you’re getting it 20 seconds later.” Read more in this case study.
These tools were developed through Newfront’s hackathons. In addition to engineers, product managers, and designers, Newfront embeds insurance professionals into hackathon teams, as they have a deep understanding of client needs.
Listen to the full episode to learn about how Lipkin encourages tech-adoption within Newfront, emerging paradigm shifts in the industry, and the continued importance of human relationships.
