Ryan Unruch: Hi, my name is Ryan Unruch. I’m a partner in Osler’s Emerging and High Growth Companies Group. Today, I’d like to introduce everyone to Jai and Anthony, the amazing founders behind General Magic, a startup dedicated to transforming the often dreaded experience of insurance claims into seamless digital journey. Following their success in the a16z speedrun program, the duo recently announced their 7.2-million U.S. seed round, led by Radical Ventures, to accelerate their mission of eliminating the bureaucratic slog of the insurance industry. Jai and Anthony, welcome, and thanks so much for being with us today.
Anthony Azrak: Thanks, Ryan.
Jai Mansukhani: Yeah, glad to be here.
Ryan Unruch: So if you don’t mind, we could, we could jump right in. Jai and Anthony, I hope you could just give us a general overview of what General Magic does and what markets you’re in now and what you’re looking to expand to.
Jai Mansukhani: I can give an overview of the product. I think Anthony can give a little bit of deeper insight into what the vision is over the next couple of years. But essentially, today we’re starting off by building these AI messaging agents that can be deployed on platforms like iMessage or WhatsApp. And essentially, what this allows the end consumer to do is when we sell to a brokerage or a carrier, we help them finish their entire insurance workflow over text. So obviously, Ryan, you can probably experience this yourself, insurance is not a very easy, process, especially when you’re dealing with transparency on what your claim is or your policy, what kind of the coverage includes. So the overall customer experience is pretty bad, and this did kind of span from me having a very bad leak in my apartment as well. That’s how we kind of discovered, like, a lot of, you know, issues with the current system today. So we kind of wanted to kind of abstract that process and make it just dead simple for anyone to text us verified number, get information about their insurance, and then obviously give really good data back to the insurance provider so they can make better decisions about their customers.
Anthony Azrak: So we’re sharing with the intake process, whether that’s through voice or text messaging or forms or any other, modality. And we eventually want to expand to other form factors and other workflows as well, so that eventually it’ll probably automate the entire brokerage from start to end.
Ryan Unruch: Wow. That’s amazing. So you guys have had a lot of success in the past couple of months. As I mentioned beforehand, recently kind of closed your seed round at 7.2 million from, you know, some of the best investors in the world, including Radical Ventures, A16, luminaries from Figma, OpenAI. Can you generally just talk about your experience of what it was like in the past couple of months, kind of going out there, raising a seed round as a Canadian company and going out there, kind of, how long did it take? What was your process? How did you get in contact with investors, just in general?
Anthony Azrak: Very, very hectic, to say the least. I think, when we started the company, Jai and I, we really wanted to get in touch with the whole investor community, make sure that we knew the people that we’re interacting with, that we could really trust them. And throughout that process, you know, for the past couple of months, we’ve been interacting with folks at Radical. They’re very much embedded into the Canadian ecosystem in terms of, you know, leaders in AI research and funding some of the largest companies out there like Cohere. And, we’re very grateful to have, the CEO of Cohere come in as an angel as well. And so that’s how we got introduced to the folks at Radical at the start. When it came time for us to start the fundraise process, we kind of went through all of our contacts and really made a list of, you know, who we thought could be good partners. And, that whole process took maybe three to four weeks to get the round sorted, and very, very happy with the results. We ended up with partners that we could really trust and folks that we knew had our backs, through ups and downs.
Ryan Unruch: That’s great. So maybe we could move from the fundraising and start looking ahead. What are some of the kind of significant challenges you anticipate in scaling General Magic? And, and what are some of the really exciting things you have plannedthat you’re looking forward to for 2026?
Jai Mansukhani: I mean, obviously insurance as an industry moves quite slow, and startups on the opposite side are like, “Hey, we wanna move very fast,” you know, like, “fail quickly, iterate very fast.” So I think traditionally trying to change that mindset is usually a challenge. But I do think, like, it’s a very good industry to disrupt because I think it’s a very stable industry as well. Insurance is needed for everything. The world runs on insurance. That’s what we like to say. If you buy a car, you get a new office, you purchase a house, everyone needs insurance. So it is one of the most stable industries you’ve seen, but it’s also inherently, like, kind of slow when it comes to changing or having a massive shift in how people think about processes. So I think that’s a challenge, but it’s obviously an exciting one to take on, and I think that’s what motivates the team as well, because there is an end goal of kind of fundamentally changing the way people interact with their insurance provider or just handle insurance in general. So I think, like, there’s a big opportunity in this space.
Ryan Unruch: Yeah, no, and much needed. I look forward to kind of using this in the future given some disasters we’ve had in the past. But, one of the things we always get questioned, so on an annual basis, we publish this report, and one of the reasons we publish this report is to kind of give information intel to the market in terms of, you know, what you could expect in raising a financing round and what is market, so that everyone’s kind of on the same page in terms of the data. What are some of the recommendations you would give to kind of other founders in the same position as you maybe, you know, six to eight months ago as they go out and raise the round, something you learned as part of the process that you would love kind of other founders to know going into a similar process as you to go raise their initial seed round or maybe their first safe round?
Anthony Azrak: It’s a slog for sure. I think you hear some things from the folks in Silicon Valley where maybe you try to optimize for your valuation, maybe you try to — you don’t really care about who your partners are, or you just care about the money. We’ve taken an approach of, hey, like, this round is a round where, you know, we’re both pretty young. Like, we’re both 24. We have a lot to learn. We know that we don’t know everything, and so we’d rather optimize for the people that we’re partnering up with. And, you know, it’s all, it’s all nice to say that, hey, your seed round is at a hundred mil valuation, but that probably means that your Series A has to be at a three hundred mil valuation. So is that realistic? I don’t know. So, you know, it’s on a spectrum. Some people would rather take the risk and go all in. And, you know, if you don’t reach that ridiculous valuation, then you have to do a down round and you’re getting more diluted, and it’s all these factors.
Jai Mansukhani: I think it’s also, it really comes down to what you wanna optimize for at the time you’re raising the round. I think, like, for Anthony and I was really optimizing for distribution, and which partner was correct at the time of choice, right? So when you look at the overall market, people are just raising money for the sake of it. I think, like, if you’re really trying to find a partner that can add value with you from your seed to your Series A, then it makes much more sense. I think that always adds more weight to the people you have around you, especially when you have a board. It’s very important to kind of structure these things kind of very systematically so you know where the company’s going each quarter or even each month to that extent. So I think it’s very important to have partners that believe in you, obviously team-wise, but just can optimize how much distribution you can get out of it, which I think is inherent when you have, like, people like a16z speedrun that just extend the network into the adjacent one, and then also people like Radical who are just very well-structured on, like, go to market and how to kind of approach hiring.
Ryan Unruch: No, it’s great. Well, thank you both. It’s been such a pleasure talking to you today to hear about your milestones and your vision for the future of the insurance industry. Also, you know, having worked with you guys since incorporation and seeing how thoughtful you’ve been in the process of kind of, you know, raising your initial round and kind of the thought process of expanding your round and who your investor is going to be and, and the whole process, it’s just been amazing to watch, especially for such, you know, two young guys as, as yourself. But thank you for taking the time to share your story behind your raise. We look forward to seeing all the incredible things that General Magic will accomplish in the coming year. And, yeah, thank you and for sharing it with our audience.
Anthony Azrak: Thanks, Ryan.
Jai Mansuhkani: Thanks for having us.
