Ascend

We’re building the first autonomous insurance group, starting with Morrow, our AI-native commercial insurance brokerage. We help businesses find, compare, and buy insurance across 100+ carriers. Every placement deepens our understanding of businesses, risk, and underwriting. We’re turning that knowledge into an insurance ontology that gives our AI agents the context to reason, apply judgment, and execute insurance workflows autonomously across calls, emails, and carrier portals. Our ambition is to build the most comprehensive intelligence layer in the industry. Over time, we’ll use this foundation to develop and underwrite our own insurance products. Insurance spending represents 12% of U.S. GDP, and we want to go after all of it. We’re backed by C-suite executives at some of the world’s largest insurers, first-check investors in Rippling and Twilio, and a Cloudflare board member.

We're building the first AI-native go-to-market agency in the DACH region. Since 2024, we've grown to over €5M ARR and a team of 30+, working with more than 200 leading B2B tech companies.

Augustus is building the global dollar bank. Moving dollars across borders still runs on correspondent banking, a chain of intermediaries that is slow, opaque, and expensive. Augustus replaces it with programmable USD and EUR accounts, direct clearing and settlement, and an AI-native core banking platform built from scratch. The moat is the license. Augustus holds OCC conditional approval for a US national bank charter, which is rare and very hard to replicate, and euro clearing is live today for customers including Kraken. $180M Series B at a $1B valuation, led by Tiger Global with QED, plus operators from Nubank, Ramp, Circle, Revolut, and Coinbase. Fewer than 50 people, in NYC and Berlin.