Great Hill Invests in Aurenity for E&S Growth

Great Hill Partners has made a strategic investment in Aurenity, a technology-enabled managing general agent serving the U.S. excess and surplus insurance market. The firms announced the transaction on September 1, 2026, and did not disclose the investment amount, valuation, ownership percentage, or other financial terms.

Aurenity's founding investor, Agman, and the company's management team will retain significant equity stakes. Great Hill says the investment will support underwriter recruitment, new specialty-program launches, and further development of the automation, systems, and artificial-intelligence infrastructure behind Aurenity's platform.

The transaction arrives as more complex risks move into excess and surplus lines, where specialist underwriters can structure coverage that standard insurance markets may not accept. That growth creates an attractive opening for MGAs, but it also raises the operating question behind Great Hill's investment: can Aurenity process more business without weakening the risk judgment that earns carrier capacity?

What Great Hill Is Backing

Aurenity launched in January 2022 with a $10M seed investment from Agman. The West Hartford, Connecticut company was built around an expertise-led, technology-enabled model for E&S insurance, pairing experienced underwriting teams with pricing analytics, automation, and portfolio-management tools.

The company now operates six core programs spanning primary, lead and excess casualty, public entity and religious risks, and property. Its customers are wholesale brokers and the carrier partners that supply the capacity behind those programs. Aurenity's product is therefore more than a policy or a software interface; it is a repeatable way to turn complex submissions into risk decisions a carrier is willing to fund.

Great Hill is entering that model as a growth investor with financial-services and insurance experience. The firm says it has raised funds representing more than $19B in commitments and invested in more than 100 companies since 1998. Its existing insurance-related investments include One Inc, Pareto, and Second Nature.

Why Underwriting Talent Comes Before Scale

An E&S MGA does not manufacture insurance capacity on its own. It uses delegated authority and carrier relationships to underwrite specialized risks, which makes the quality of its people and portfolio decisions central to the business. New distribution can create submission volume quickly; experienced teams decide which opportunities deserve a quote and at what terms.

Aurenity's current leadership reflects that emphasis. Nick Davies is CEO, Douglas Trainor is CUO, and Patrick Safino is COO. Janet Beaver leads excess casualty, Mark Fuderanan leads primary casualty, Kevin Thommes leads public entity, and John Woie leads property. Their collective job is to translate line-specific underwriting judgment into programs that brokers can access and carriers can support through market cycles.

Great Hill's capital is intended to recruit additional underwriting teams and launch more specialty programs. That approach can expand Aurenity's addressable market one focused line at a time, but it also creates a demanding integration task. Each new team brings its own data, broker relationships, risk appetite, workflow, and portfolio obligations into the platform.

Where Automation and AI Fit

Aurenity calls its pricing approach Augment. The company says it combines exposure and experience data, predictive analytics, segmentation, and portfolio tools to give underwriters a better view of risk. The word matters because Aurenity's public position is that technology should enable underwriting expertise rather than replace it.

The company has disclosed relationships with Verisk for underwriting and rating data, Origami Risk for operating infrastructure, and Heron for submission intake and enrichment. In an Aurenity case study, the company reported that Heron automation doubled submission capacity and reclaimed more than 1,000 hours annually without adding headcount. Those are company-reported operating results, but they illustrate the practical role of automation: extract and normalize information, remove duplicate work, and route submissions so underwriters can spend more time on risk selection.

Great Hill's investment will fund additional systems and AI work alongside hiring. The useful measure will not be how many AI features appear in the workflow. It will be whether the infrastructure makes decisions faster and more consistent while preserving human accountability for pricing, attachment, limits, and portfolio concentration.

The E&S Market Behind the Deal

The excess and surplus market covers risks that are difficult to place through standard admitted insurers, often because the exposure is unusual, the loss history is limited, or the coverage requires specialized terms. According to the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, U.S. surplus lines direct premium reached approximately $131B in 2024, up 12.2%, and represented about 12% of the U.S. property and casualty market.

WSIA-linked market reporting put stamping-office surplus lines premium at $90.3B in 2025, up about 8%. The figures use different market scopes, but both point to sustained growth as property volatility, liability complexity, emerging technologies, and shifting admitted-market appetites move more business toward specialized insurance.

Growth does not make every E&S program attractive. Amwins' 2026 market outlook describes varying capacity and pricing conditions across lines while continuing to emphasize detailed risk data and underwriting discipline. For an MGA, that environment rewards infrastructure that can help a specialist understand an exposure without turning the underwriting process into a generic volume exercise.

Governance and the Next Operating Test

The investment adds Great Hill Managing Directors Matt Vettel and Nick Cayer and Principal Bob Anderson to Aurenity's board. Agman founder and CEO Scott Silverman said the original investor will remain involved, while Davies framed the partnership around recruiting underwriters, bringing programs to market, and increasing Aurenity's use of AI without abandoning its expertise-led culture.

The advisers also signal the transaction's institutional weight. Ardea Partners and Oliver Wyman advised Great Hill on financial and actuarial matters, Goodwin Procter served as Great Hill's legal counsel, Evercore advised Aurenity financially, and Fried Frank served as Aurenity's legal counsel.

Aurenity now has capital, an expanded board, and a six-program operating base. The next evidence will come from the handoffs between them: whether new underwriting teams fit the platform, whether technology improves selection instead of merely accelerating intake, and whether carrier partners continue to place capacity behind the portfolios that emerge.

The machinery can help the submission move. The durable business is built when the judgment at the end of that workflow earns the next commitment of carrier capital.