Founders Everywhere: Vishal Sankhla and Anshu Jain
Vishal Sankhla and Anshu Jain are the co-founders of Outmarket AI, a platform helping commercial P&C brokers and wholesalers outperform the market with AI.
Welcome to Founders Everywhere, where we highlight the incredible people behind the companies we’ve backed at Everywhere Ventures, a global pre-seed fund supported by a community of 500 founders and operators.
In the insurance industry, brokers and underwriters face constant pressure to make fast, high-stakes decisions with incomplete or inconsistent data. Traditional workflows are manual, error-prone, and slow, costing teams valuable time and business. Outmarket AI doesn’t just extract data from PDFs or run simple comparisons; it understands language, interprets business intent, and automates decisions, turning hours of work into minutes. They’re building the Intelligence Layer for Commercial Insurance, where AI acts as a true partner, anticipating needs, automating workflows, and helping professionals make smarter, faster decisions. The future of insurance isn’t just digital—it’s intelligent.
Co-founders Vishal Sankhla, and Anshu Jain, bring a unique blend of deep technical expertise, hands-on operating experience, and empathy for the end user. Vishal, CEO, previously led product and engineering teams at Ethos, Meta, and Uber, and was a co-founder of Viralheat, which was acquired by Cision. He holds a master’s in Electrical Engineering from USC and has a proven track record of building scalable AI-driven platforms. Anshu, CTO, brings deep expertise in Natural Language technologies and Machine Learning. He was an early leader in IBM Watson at IBM Research and later served as a technology leader at Meta and Ethos. When Vishal and Anshu worked together at Ethos, they spent years working directly with agents, brokers, and wholesalers, listening to their challenges and learning how they actually work. That firsthand knowledge of real workflows, systems, and pain points sparked the idea to build Outmarket AI, designed to truly solve problems for the insurance industry.
What’s Outmarket AI’s North Star?
Our North Star is to become the intelligence layer of commercial insurance. We want to help every broker, wholesaler, and carrier make faster, smarter decisions by unlocking the full potential of their data. We believe the industry does not need more dashboards or disconnected tools. It needs clarity. That means delivering real-time insights, automating high-friction workflows, and creating alignment across producers, underwriters, and leadership.
Agents and brokers are trusted advisors to businesses making critical risk decisions. By empowering them with timely intelligence and workflow automation, we enable them to deliver greater value to clients and build stronger, more strategic relationships. If we can enable that kind of connectivity and decision making through AI, we believe Outmarket can transform how the entire insurance ecosystem operates.
What makes Outmarket AI different?
Outmarket is built to simplify your day-to-day work by bringing three powerful tools together in one platform.
It understands the details inside your insurance documents.
It connects cleanly with your existing data.
It automates key workflows using AI.
While most tools only focus on one of these, we combine all three so you can go from question to answer, or from document to decision, in seconds.
What really sets us apart is our experience in commercial insurance. We have spent years working directly with brokers, agents, and underwriters. That hands-on understanding has shaped how we design every feature, so it works the way you work.
How do your products inspire ‘customer love’?
We obsess over user feedback and make it a core part of our product loop. Every workflow we ship starts with real customer pain, and every improvement is shaped by how teams actually use the platform day-to-day.
We do not just deliver value. We make teams feel empowered. Instead of spending hours digging through documents or second-guessing coverage differences, users get answers instantly. That kind of speed and clarity changes how people work, and they quickly become vocal champions.
We move fast, turning feedback into features within days, not quarters, building trust by working alongside our customers.
When users see that Outmarket makes their jobs easier, faster, and more accurate, and that we are listening every step of the way, it creates real loyalty.
What were some of the greatest challenges founding Outmarket AI?
One of the biggest challenges was earning trust in an industry that is historically risk-averse and slow to adopt new technology. Insurance is built on relationships, and people do not change the way they work unless they see clear, immediate value.
We also had to overcome the complexity of building a product that combines AI, workflow automation, and domain-specific intelligence. It is not enough to build a good UI. We had to deeply understand how brokers, underwriters, and operations teams think, what slows them down, and how to deliver insights they can actually act on.
What drives you to go into the start-up battle day after day?
We are driven by the impact we can create. Insurance may not seem glamorous from the outside, but it touches everything: businesses, families, livelihoods. When we help brokers move faster, underwriters make smarter decisions, or agencies win more business, we know we are making a real difference.
There is also a deep sense of ownership. Every conversation, every product decision, every line of code we know moves the company forward. That level of responsibility is energizing. We are also motivated by the team we have built. We believe we have assembled the best team in the industry, people who bring deep technical expertise, a passion for solving real problems, and a mindset of extreme ownership. Working with this kind of talent, where everyone is aligned around the mission, raises the bar every day and makes the journey meaningful.
Fun Fact:
Vishal: As a teenager, I started a handicraft business working with rural Indian artisans to create custom designs. It turned into a thriving family-run business that still operates today. Those same handmade products now sell in global retail chains like World Market.
Anshu: I began as an electronics engineer, believing programming was for clerks, not builders. When my grad school project for building an intelligent wheelchair crashed (literally). It nudged me to focus on software, where things like “backups” and “undo” existed. I discovered programming and never looked back. Today, code lives in my heart, fingers, and now with superwhisper… in my voice.
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