Today at Pathwork we’re unveiling PreQual Manager, our first product for the Carrier market in Life, Health, and Annuities. Massive thanks is due to my Pathwork teammates for their ingenuity and grit, and the teams at NGL Insurance Company and LifeCare Assurance Company for their trust and willingness to build something new.

Before I get into the meat of this article, I recommend reading our press release to learn more. I STRONGLY recommend if you’re an L&H CARRIER allocating important underwriter talent on answering prequal emails from brokers… set up a 30 minute call with us to hear a bit more and understand how we can implement this tool in <60 days.

Getting back to my opening line, I want to tell a founder story about thinking of this product, committing to creating it, and the why behind it.

It all goes back to a conversation with our-next-to-be-named customer (hint: Top 10 L&H carrier) in March 2025. We learned that dozens of their underwriters had to rotate working an Outlook inbox, answering unstructured emails from their brokers asking for help qualifying a prospect.

For Blake and I, it quickly became clear that this was a problem lurking in the shadows, with a dusty, oft-overlooked label reading......... “AI Use-Case”.

Most importantly, this problem fit with Blake and my product philosophy. One path a founder can pick is taking on the software big dogs and trying to beat them at their own game. Another path, our path, is to build categories that didn’t previously exist. So yeah, we boldly go where no software has gone before.

So we started selling and building simultaneously. The customer pull came fast. And the biggest external validation? A press release from John Hancock detailing how they built this capability internally. Hats off to the JH team for taking on that risk. You never want to be the only boat rowing in a direction — though we did get there a bit faster. Two years for JH to build internally. Two months for Pathwork. Bravo Blake and team.

PreQual Manager is product #1 in our carrier platform. The vision is bigger than a single inbox: we're retooling how life, health, and annuity insurance distribution flows for the AI era — across every touchpoint between carriers, distributors, and brokers. PreQual Manager is the first brick.

So today, way less emails were sent from an Outlook interface. So where is Pathwork going next? Hit subscribe and stay tuned in.

Note: Despite building AI tools, this post was written without the support of AI.