Studio

Launching Malcolm - The Infrastructure for Agentic Insurance

Studio

Launching Malcolm - The Infrastructure for Agentic Insurance

Words Founders Factory

March 17th 2026 / 3 min read

The problem

The internet is undergoing a profound structural shift from search to delegation. Over the next five years, consumers will stop spending hours filling out forms to buy insurance; they'll just instruct AI agents to arrange and purchase services on their behalf.


However, in highly regulated industries like insurance and financial services, this creates a massive, problematic roadblock. Large Language Models (LLMs) are inherently probabilistic - they guess the next word. But regulated products require absolute certainty. If an AI agent hallucinates an insurance premium or invents a coverage feature, it's more than a bad customer experience; it's a direct breach of the FCA’s Consumer Duty (PROD 4) regulations and a major liability.

Insurers can see where the world's going, and want to tap into the massive distribution potential of AI, but they cannot safely connect 20-year-old legacy pricing APIs directly to consumer LLMs without risking regulatory failure.

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The solution

Malcolm is the robust standard for the AI era. It provides the routing protocol that allows any consumer AI agent to safely communicate with regulated entities.


By sitting securely between the AI runtime and the carrier’s core infrastructure, Malcolm ensures that the AI handles the natural language conversation, but only the carrier’s verified pricing engine can generate the quote and bind the policy. Malcolm strips out the hallucination risk, providing an immutable audit trail that ensures compliance with strict compliance standards.

In using Malcolm, insurers are able to bring their products where their customers want them, compliantly, to unlock the next generation of products, information, and buying experiences.

To mark their launch, the team has also published the Agent-to-Agent (A2A) Manifesto - a set of core principles defining the new standard for safe, compliant AI distribution.

Key features

  • Universal agent integration: seamlessly handles intent from any major AI runtime (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini) or custom Insurtech co-pilots.

  • Routing engine: intelligently maps unstructured AI requests into strict JSON payloads, routing them to the exact legacy APIs required for Car, Home, Travel, or SME insurance.

  • Compliance pipeline: a built-in regulatory safety net featuring an immutable audit ledger, behavioural analysis, and hard-coded product guardrails to guarantee fair value and prevent silent mis-selling.

  • Plug-and-play tooling: Malcolm provides a set of off-the-shelf tools and components that allow you to design your own AI experiences and control the user journey.

The team

Tim Graham, CEO and Founder: bringing 10 years of experience in retail and commercial InsurTech - from start-up to $1bn dollar scale - Tim's understanding of bleeding-edge insurance products and experience bringing them to market (both as a Founder and Product Leader) underpins what Malcolm is today.

Why we’re excited to launch Malcolm

Farah Kanji, Founders Factory Chief People Officer: “AI driven distribution is inevitable but compliance is the blocker. Tim saw that early and is building Malcolm to solve for it. It's easily a billion dollar opportunity and Tim is exactly the kind of founder we couldn't ignore. Proud to be backing him"

What Malcolm is looking to get out of the Studio

  • Establish a market standard: gather signatures and support from the UK’s most forward-thinking carriers and MGAs for the A2A Manifesto.

  • Onboard insurer partners: build on our early success by bringing new partners and lines of business onto the Protocol

  • Raise for scale: close our Seed round so we can serve more partners, more quickly, with more products.

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