Steph Tulley has spent the past eight years building her own insurance brokerage firm and now she's trying to disrupt her own industry.
"When you open a brokerage you are the owner — but the true entrepreneurship is what I'm experiencing now," she said. "I'm funding it myself and there's a lot of learning; it's very out of my comfort zone but I've learned to be comfortable being uncomfortable."
Tulley is the CEO of Actuology — a term stemming from actuaries, showing the company will look at insurance through a full scope and not simply a sales perspective.
The company offers a SaaS solution for insurance technology companies through an API (application programming interface) plug-in that helps with the advising experience. Tulley is building the tech herself.
"[At my firm] I thought, 'This can be automated; there's no reason to have so many hands involved in it,'" she said. "And if we’re a tech company, I have to make sure to speak their language, have an actionable reason behind it and have logic beyond a hypothetical. If I say, 'I'm a tech CEO,' I have to get my hands dirty."
Tulley also still runs her firm, which offers commercial insurance for startups. It's originally what brought Tulley, a native New Yorker, from Orlando to Tampa Bay.
"I was brought here, then it turned into, start your own company," the 25-year-old said with a chuckle.
Actuology is a member of Tampa-based innovation hub Embarc Collective. It has five employees and is seeking a seed round of roughly $500,000.
Tulley joins a growing list of insurtech companies in the Tampa Bay region, many of which have seen success in the last year. There's Slide, which raised $100 million shortly after launching, and TrustLayer, which moved from Silicon Valley in 2020 and since then racked up over $20 million in funding.
But despite some large players finding wide success in the region, Tulley believes the Tampa Bay community has room for improvement when it comes to shining a light on the local industry.
"This is the place for insurtech to boom; we’re already a hub for insurance and on top of that the tech is booming right now," she said. "There's a ton of money in what we do and such a need for it, but not a lot of people are going toward it. So Tampa has to put recognition on the company and treat them like fintech companies, which have traditionally gotten more attention."
And Tulley is happy to lead that charge, hoping to collaborate with the other major players in the region.
"The point is not to compete with the players, it's to transform the industry," she said. "If we can open the floodgates to insurtech as not just a company, but a service, then I've done what I need to do."
