They didn’t want to go corporate; how AI gave brothers the tools to forge their own path, together

Tyler and Garrett Amundsen are using AI to help insurance brokers spend more time on relationships and less time on data, the duo shared.

Inspired by conversations around their family’s Kansas City dinner table, as well as the latest tech developments, the brothers launched LightDoc in early 2023 to automate and streamline repetitive tasks that don’t generate revenue and prevent brokers from being able to scale and connect with clients.

“We grew up with our mom and her brothers having started an insurance agency in Kansas City,” older brother Tyler Amundsen explained. “So there were always conversations where we were aware of the industry, the outdated technology, and how much of their real business is built on relationships — then data.”

While working as a sales operations manager for C2FO in late 2022 when ChatGPT first hit the mainstream, Tyler Amundsen mulled ways AI could help him be more efficient, especially with administrative tasks, he noted.

“That was the initial jumping off point of wanting to figure out a way to help businesses leverage this new technology and reach new levels of productivity,” he continued, “and do it in a way that isn’t necessarily designed to eliminate employees. The idea is to help employees eliminate the work they didn’t want to do in the first place and spend more time with their clients, more time with their teams.”

With the addition of Vrain Ahuja as chief technology officer, the Amundsen brothers — now both University of Kansas graduates — have come up with solutions to assist property and casualty brokers with policy checking, quote comparison, certificates of insurance, and proposal generation.

They examined what goes into the complex documents and pipelines managed by service resp and account managers, then looked to automate any back office tasks, explained Tyler Amundsen, who is now based in Austin, Texas.

“If they miss something — and a claim gets filed — the broker is ultimately liable because they were the ones who said, ‘Your policy is good. We’ve checked it.’ When, in reality, they maybe didn’t,” he added.

LightDoc can take more off the brokers’ plates, he continued, and do it in a way that’s more cost effective.

“What that does for our customers is basically gives them an economy of scale, where the more tasks you’re sending through us, the cheaper it is on a per unit basis,” he said.

Entrepreneurship as the only option

While in college at the KU School of Business, both Amundsen brothers understood they didn’t want to follow corporate paths, they shared, looking more toward their mom’s journey into entrepreneurship. 

Garrett Amundsen hosts the “Once Upon A Startup” Podcast in 2022; photo by Channa Steinmetz, Startland News

“I always knew that I never wanted to join a traditional company,” said Garrett Amundsen, who is based in Kansas City. “I was an entrepreneur way back in eighth grade, started a landscaping business, started a podcast, and just knew, ‘Hey, if I can do as much as I can now, my goal by the end of college is to not have to go and submit my resume to a bunch of people, but to have my own thing already started by then.’”

Tyler Amundsen hoped to find a startup to join immediately after college before eventually branching out on his own, he noted.

After hearing C2FO founder Sandy Kemper speak at KU, Amundsen viewed him as a visionary leader — and setting his sights on putting himself in Kemper’s “stratosphere.” He applied to C2FO, and was hired at an entry level sales position, ultimately working his way up to management, he said.

“That was where I spent about a year, really learning how to work with product teams and take products to market and understanding what all that entails working,” he continued. “Toward the tail end of that, ChatGPT came out and I was like, ‘All right, I’ve learned a lot. I think for me to really take it to the next level of learning, it’s time for me to go out on my own.’”

Garrett Amundsen encouraged him to take the leap, he recalled, and said he would be right there beside him. After helping part-time while taking classes, he graduated from KU a semester early in December 2024, then joined his brother full time.

“I always wanted to be an entrepreneur and the fact that AI was launched right at that critical point in my life just made it even more of a no brainer,” Garrett Amundsen said. “Now it’s easier than ever to build something, so I just tried to give myself no other option. And now here we are today.”

Lightweight solutions in less time

The co-founders have worked their way through several iterations of LightDoc based on feedback, Tyler Amundsen noted, including notes from the 2025 BrokerTech Ventures Accelerator, which brings broker-centric insurtech startups together with seed-funding. 

​​”The feedback we originally got was, ‘We don’t necessarily need the world’s most in-depth policy check; we just want to know if there are any errors here that are going to cause trouble for us,’” he explained. “We realize that because of the way that the technology has evolved, we can have a bigger impact by going wider — as opposed to going deeper — so focusing on more lightweight solutions that we can deploy in less time.”

“One of the big themes (from BrokerTech Ventures): ‘We want you to basically act as an employee in the background. We don’t want an app,’” he added. “So we looked at how we can shift the way we design the application to sit in the background, making it really easy for them to send the tasks to us. Then we automate and send it right back to them without having to log into another app or manage another user interface.”

Now that the brothers are gaining traction in the property and casualty insurance world, they said, they aim to expand into the benefits insurance space — their mom’s area of expertise. Similar to its property and casualty offerings, LightDoc plans to provide solutions for plan checking, quote comparison and proposal generation, and data extraction and import.

“It’s a similar framework of unstructured data that you need to make sense of and either compare it, fill out another form, or push that data into another system,” Tyler Amundsen continued. “All that exists on the benefit side, but there’s not many solutions out there.”

“So that’s something that we’re now stepping into, working with a couple really large companies in the benefits space,” he added, “and developing early proof of concept solutions for them. That’s something that we think could be a real differentiator for us, as well.”

The post They didn’t want to go corporate; how AI gave brothers the tools to forge their own path, together appeared first on Startland News.