General Magic just pulled $7.2M out of the ether, and no, that’s not a nostalgia tour of the 90s. This is a Toronto insurtech startup that decided insurance shouldn’t feel like dialing into a fax machine with anxiety. The round was oversubscribed, led by Radical Ventures, with a16z Speedrun back in the mix and operators like Brendan O’Driscoll of Figma, Larry James Erwin of OpenAI, Aidan Gomez of Cohere, Kevin Wang and Spencer Burke of Braze leaning in. Smart money recognizes signal.
Respect where it’s due. Anthony Azrak and Jai Mansukhani, co-founders of General Magic, built this with scars from selling AI into legacy industries. Jai Mansukhani is also President, and together they looked at insurance and saw a sector drowning in calls, emails, portals, and “please hold” music that could break a saint. Instead of complaining, they shipped.
The product is called Cell. Appropriate name. In insurance, everything is cellular. Fragmented. Isolated. Waiting for a signal. Cell is an AI texting agent that lives in SMS, iMessage, and RCS, handling pre-quote eligibility, post-quote follow-ups, document collection, and claims coordination. It plugs into broker management systems, quoting platforms, CRMs, policy, billing, and claims systems. It does not rip and replace. It reasons on top.
One of the world’s largest general insurers used Cell and cut time-to-quote from around 30 minutes to under 3 minutes. 3. That is not a marginal gain. That is the difference between “I’ll think about it” and “Where do I sign.” Inbound calls dropped about 30%. Teams saved over 250 hours a month. Not theory. Throughput.
Total funding now sits at $8.4M. Early stage, yes. Small team, by design. This is not about headcount theater. It is about leverage. The bet is simple: when customers are ready to act, you meet them where they already live, in messaging, and you remove the friction that legacy systems quietly profit from.
General Magic is not trying to be loud. It is trying to be useful. A reasoning layer over systems of record. A quiet operator inside chaotic workflows. Insurance has spent decades optimizing forms and phone trees. Anthony Azrak and Jai Mansukhani are optimizing moments.
