Equal Parts targets 10 deals by year one in culture-first acquisition strategy, says CEO Witte

By Mia MacGregor

July 7 - (The Insurer) - Equal Parts, a five-month-old AI-focused broker consolidator, is pursuing aggressive growth in the independent insurance agency market with plans to acquire 10 agencies by its one-year mark while deploying artificial intelligence to solve operational inefficiencies, CEO and co-founder Mike Witte told The Insurer.

The Austin-based company, which launched with $10 million in acquisition capital, currently has a "maxed out pipeline" for acquisitions through Q4 2024 and expects to have approximately 10 agencies under its umbrella by the end of Q1 2026, according to Witte.

"We're going to go buy 1,000 agencies. And so what's critical about these first 10, these first 20, is this is what really establishes your culture," Witte said. "It's about people... I need people that want to keep running, that are excited, motivated."

Equal Parts prioritizes company culture and leadership quality over geographic footprint, targeting agencies run by owners who want to continue operating while gaining technological capabilities.

"The reality is that it is an older generation, like half the industry is retiring," Witte explained. "There's a lot of people that want to sell their business, which is fine and a great opportunity for us next year or in year three, but right now, we need people, and we need good people."

The company is targeting independent insurance agencies with a focus on preserving human relationships while automating back-office operations that have traditionally bogged down agency growth.

"The mission of the company is leveraging AI to enhance, not replace, the human connection in insurance," Witte said. "Equal parts innovation and relationships, equal parts technology and tradition."

After extensive conversations with small agency owners, Witte concluded that insurance's primary challenge isn't a lack of technology but rather poor system integration.

"Insurance has a massive connectivity problem, and that's it. Nothing connects. Everything is a point-to-point solution which makes things incredibly painful," he said. "Quite literally, you're talking about, to run an agency, inputting people's name and address 12 times, just trying to get basic work done."

Equal Parts addresses this through what Witte calls an "80/20 rule": building 20% custom code that connects to 80% best-in-class existing systems. The company's AI applications include quote analysis, data parsing, multiquote comparisons and intelligent market recommendations for client applications.

"Once you have really good connectivity from a systems perspective, introducing agentic components gets a lot easier and gets a lot more powerful," Witte said.

In June, Equal Parts announced that it had acquired Assurely, an Austin-based agency serving startups and emerging companies.