Raphael Vullierme has seen the inside of financial services distribution better than most. As co-founder and CEO of Luko, France's leading online home insurer, he spent years building a business on the assumption that digital channels were the future. Then AI arrived and made him realize the channels themselves were about to be replaced. That insight brought him to Hexa as Partner to build what comes next.
The shift is already happening. Consumers and businesses are increasingly turning to AI to navigate complex financial decisions: insurance policies, mortgages, lending products. Whether through ChatGPT, Claude, or personal agents, the buyer is no longer a human clicking through a funnel. It's a model. And the entire infrastructure built to win human attention (the funnels, the SEO, the sales tactics) was never designed for this world. Vendors are losing control of their distribution, and most of them don't yet know it.
Waniwani was built to fix this. The company has released an open-source SDK that lets any quote-based service vendor (insurance, mortgage, home services, software) offer their products and quotes directly inside AI apps like ChatGPT, Claude, and Copilot, or through a conversational agent on their own website or WhatsApp. But Robin Diligent, co-founder and CEO, is clear that deploying an agent is just the beginning:
"Distribution is moving to AI, and that shift is irreversible. We're committed to giving every service vendor the most advanced and complete open-source solution to build their distribution on. One that keeps improving so they can meet buyers wherever AI takes them. But deploying the agent is just the start. The real work begins after: vendors need to drive traffic to these agents, dynamically optimize their full funnel to win customers and maximize revenue, all while staying compliant with local regulations. That's the whole purpose of our infrastructure."
Once live, Waniwani's infrastructure modules help financial institutions manage regulatory and brand compliance, simulate market performance, optimize revenue and pricing, and protect against scraping - the full stack a vendor needs to compete in an AI-native distribution landscape.
The traction already speaks for itself:
- First became known as the infrastructure powering Tuio's ChatGPT app: the first to unlock insurance quoting inside ChatGPT, an event that rattled the $80B insurance market on February 9th
- On track to reach several million dollars of revenue in its first year of operation
- Clients across the US, Europe, LatAm, the Middle East, Korea, and Australia, global within months of launch
- Distribution and integration partnerships closed with Deloitte, among others
- Headquartered in San Francisco, with offices in New York and Paris
The $8M seed round, led by Seedcamp, with participation from Redstone, Zone II Ventures, and Plug & Play, will fuel Waniwani's expansion across markets and further development of its infrastructure platform. It's a bet on a team that has the rare combination of deep regulatory fluency, technical depth, and hard-won distribution expertise, and on a thesis that is only becoming more obvious by the day.
We've watched this team move faster, and smarter, than anyone else in this space. We're proud to be building alongside them. 💙
Learn more at waniwani.com