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On February 9, Willis Towers Watson fell 13% in a single day, its worst decline since 2008, while Aon and Arthur J. Gallagher dropped 8% to 11%. In Europe, the STOXX 600 insurance index fell 1.3%, affecting Hiscox, Aviva, and AXA.
The market saw these changes as a serious threat to the broker model. Goldman Sachs later called the 9% broker sell-off overdone, and stocks partly recovered over the next three weeks. But Bank of America disagreed. In a March note, its analysts said $15 billion in broker revenue is at risk from AI-driven changes. The debate is still ongoing.
The drop was caused by a ChatGPT-backed app, Tuio, that let users get home insurance quotes during a conversation. Waniwani, a US startup, provided the technology behind this. According to Robin Diligent, co-founder and chief executive of Waniwani, this gave the company “an unfair head start and visibility” in the race to become the main platform for AI financial distribution.
Today, Waniwani has raised $8 million in seed funding led by Seedcamp, with support from Redstone, Zone II Ventures, Plug & Play, and several angel investors. The company’s total funding to date, including the seed round and a pre-seed investment from Hexa, is approximately $8.7 million.
“Distribution is moving to AI, and that shift is irreversible. We’re committed to giving every service vendor the most advanced and complete open-source solution to build their distribution on. But deploying the agent is just the start,” says Diligent.
“The real work begins after: vendors need to drive traffic to these agents, dynamically optimise their full funnel to win customers and maximise revenue, all while staying compliant with local regulations. That’s the whole purpose of our infrastructure,” he adds.
Waniwani was founded in early 2026 and is based in San Francisco, with offices in New York and Paris. The company started at Hexa, a European venture studio formerly called eFounders, which has also backed Front, Aircall, and Spendesk.
Diligent previously led Boston Consulting Group’s Geneva office and was a key member of its generative AI team, working on large AI projects for big clients. Co-founder and chairman Raphaël Vullierme also co-founded Luko, which became France’s largest online home insurer before Allianz Direct bought it in January 2024 for €4.3 million.
Vullierme spent nearly a decade leading an insurer, observing brokers, comparison sites, and direct sales channels compete for consumer attention. As AI platforms began to aggregate this attention at scale, he witnessed the distribution model shift in real time.
Co-founder and chief technology officer Maxime Antoine previously led engineering at Cantina, building security platforms for Coinbase, Uniswap, Mastercard, and UBS. Co-founder Luiza Gusmao was formerly a vice president at Cover Genius, a global embedded insurance platform.
Waniwani’s core product is an open-source software development kit that enables any quote-based services vendor, including insurance, mortgages, home services, and software, to build its own sales agent and distribute it directly within AI platforms such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Google’s Gemini, as well as through conversational channels like WhatsApp.
The company generates revenue through a paid infrastructure layer that includes compliance and regulatory monitoring tools, funnel simulation and performance analytics, pricing optimisation, and anti-scraping protection.
This is an intentionally familiar model. Stripe provided free developer tools and charged for payment processing, while Twilio offered free communications APIs and charged for infrastructure. Waniwani anticipates that financial services vendors will follow a similar path: starting with free tools and transitioning to a platform that manages regulated, high-stakes operations. The company describes itself as “Shopify, but for services.”
Waniwani has achieved broad geographic traction for a company less than a year old, with clients across Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, South Korea, Australia, and its primary US market. The company has established a strategic partnership with Deloitte UK to support financial institutions in deploying Waniwani’s infrastructure.
Aviva and MONY Group, the parent of MoneySuperMarket in the UK, have also announced ChatGPT applications built on the platform. Waniwani reports it is on track to generate several million dollars in revenue in its first year.
The competitive landscape is still evolving. Established insurance technology companies such as Majesco, Guidewire, and Duck Creek Technologies have not specifically focused on AI channel distribution as Waniwani has.
A more direct competitive risk may arise from the AI platforms themselves. If OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google develop native monetisation solutions for financial services providers, Waniwani’s infrastructure layer could be bypassed.
Waniwani states that the capital will support the expansion of its open-source SDK, the growth of its paid infrastructure modules, and ongoing international expansion.
The broader question raised is whether February 9 was an isolated incident or the beginning of a structural shift in financial services distribution. Bank of America supports the latter view, while Goldman Sachs believes the market overreacted.
Waniwani is positioning its business on the expectation that change is underway.
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