Equal Parts is building an operating platform for independent insurance agencies that combines acquisitions with purpose-built technology, automation, standardized workflows, and a unified data layer. The company’s model is designed to help acquired agencies improve performance while preserving the relationships and culture at the center of their businesses. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Equal Parts CEO and Co-Founder Mike Witte to learn more.
Mike Witte’s Background
When asked about his background, Witte shared:
My entire career has been spent building businesses in service industries where trust and long-standing relationships drive how work gets done. Most recently, I spent nearly a decade co-founding and scaling RigUp, growing it from two founders working out of a closet into a $2.9 billion company serving the energy sector.
The lesson I took from that experience wasn’t about scale for its own sake. It was about what happens when you build real operating infrastructure underneath relationship-driven businesses. Technology doesn’t replace the human side, it removes the friction that gets in the way of it.
After RigUp, I was looking for another industry with similar characteristics: highly fragmented, built on trust, and structurally underserved by modern technology. Insurance stood out immediately, and the more I looked, the clearer the opportunity became.
How Equal Parts Started
When asked how the idea for the company came together, Witte explained:
Independent insurance kept coming up as I studied markets ripe for transformation. It’s a $215 billion revenue market made up of roughly 422,000 distributors, most of them small, relationship-driven agencies running on aging technology with no succession plan and a workforce nearing retirement. About half of all agents are expected to retire in the next decade.
Private equity has been consolidating the industry for years, but their model is financial engineering. They’re acquiring agencies to extract margin, not to invest in the infrastructure that would actually make them better businesses. The result is that agency culture and client relationships, the things that made these agencies worth acquiring, often get hollowed out in the process.
The question I kept asking was: what if you acquired great agencies and immediately plugged them into an operating system purpose-built to improve their performance? Instead of a new owner with a cost-cutting playbook, we’d build an infrastructure that compresses integration timelines, standardizes workflows, automates back-office work, and creates a unified data layer from day one so that every acquisition starts performing faster than the one before it.
That’s the Equal Parts model.
My co-founders made it executable. Graham Yennie spent a decade building complex ML and AI platforms. Mike Meller helped build RigUp’s small business acquisition and growth strategy. Together we had exactly the skill set this requires.
Validating The Model
When asked about his favorite memory working for the company so far, Witte recalled:
One that stands out is an email I received from Benito Ortiz, the founder of Strategic Insurance Group in Albuquerque. He told me he was sitting on three private equity offers which were financially solid, but completely uninspiring. After our conversations, he decided to take his company off the market and wait for the right opportunity with Equal Parts.
He said our vision was unlike anything else he’d seen in the industry. That email captured our entire thesis. We’re not just another buyer. When agency owners recognize that, it’s validating in a way no metric can replicate.
Core Platform And Features
When asked about the company’s core products and features, Witte detailed:
The Equal Parts operating platform is the core of everything we do, and I want to be specific about what that means, because it’s easy to say “platform” without explaining why it matters.
Legacy agency management systems weren’t designed for acquisitions. Integrating a new agency on those platforms means months of dual systems running in parallel, manual workarounds, slow reporting, and institutional knowledge that lives only in people’s heads. That’s the status quo, and it’s expensive in regards to time, margin, and the agency culture you’re trying to preserve.
Our platform was built from the ground up to solve that problem. When we acquire an agency, we plug them into an operating system that compresses integration timelines from months to days, standardizes workflows across the portfolio, automates back-office tasks, and creates a unified data layer from day one. Agents stop managing administrative burden and start spending their time building relationships and closing business, which is where the real value in an independent agency lives.
The compounding effect is what makes this model different from anything else in the market. Every acquisition we make enters a more refined system than the one before it. The improvements we build for agency three benefit agency seven. The operational leverage compounds with every deal.
That’s not how traditional buyers operate, and it’s not what a software vendor can offer. It’s what happens when you own both the infrastructure and the agencies running on it.
Carrier Access And Integration
When asked about challenges in the company’s sector and how Equal Parts has addressed them, Witte noted:
Carrier access has been one of the biggest friction points early on. Smaller agencies face a structural disadvantage in that lower volume means lower commissions and fewer product options.
In some cases we’ve relied on wholesalers and aggregators while we build stronger carrier relationships. That’s the stage we’re in, and it improves as our portfolio grows and our scale becomes harder to ignore.
Integration speed is the other challenge, and honestly, it’s the one our platform was built to solve. Every acquisition comes with its own systems, processes, and institutional knowledge.
We’re constantly refining our playbook to shorten the time from close to full operational integration. Each deal teaches us something the next deal benefits from. That compounding is a structural advantage, but it takes reps to build. We’re building them.
Technology Evolution
When asked how the company’s technology has evolved since launching, Witte explained:
Since our launch in March 2025, the platform has moved quickly from concept to something with real proof points.
Our philosophy from day one was to not rebuild what already exists. There are strong third-party tools in the market. The gap isn’t the tools, it’s the infrastructure to deploy them inside smaller agencies that don’t have the technical resources to do it themselves.
A 60-year-old agency owner running a book of business he’s spent decades building shouldn’t need an IT team to access best-in-class AI applications. Our platform is what makes that possible.
Where we focus our internal development is on the automation and agentic workflow layers, the connective tissue that creates leverage across the entire portfolio.
Every improvement compounds. Every new acquisition enters a system that’s already been refined by the ones before it. That’s what makes our model more valuable at agency ten than it was at agency one, and more valuable still at agency twenty-five.
Major Company Milestones
When asked about some of the company’s most significant milestones, Witte said:
We launched in March 2025 and made our first acquisition, Lumen Insurance in Austin, which focused on venture-backed startups and was a strong early fit for what we’re building.
After that, we acquired Assurely and Strategic Insurance in New Mexico, which expanded our footprint beyond Texas and started to build regional density.
Closing our Series A in February 2026 was another major milestone. It gave us the capital to accelerate acquisitions and continue investing in the platform that powers them.
Lumen Insurance Success
When asked to share a specific customer success story, Witte highlighted:
David Perez and Lumen Insurance is the story I come back to most. David built a deeply relationship-driven agency serving venture-backed startups from seed stage through growth. He had multiple acquisition options, including larger, very well-capitalized buyers.
He chose Equal Parts because he believed in strengthening relationships with technology rather than dismantling what made the agency work. He’s said publicly that our track record and approach made the decision easy, even in an industry that tends to be risk-averse.
What that tells me is that agency owners aren’t just evaluating multiples. They’re evaluating what happens to their agency, their team, their clients, their reputation, on the other side of the deal.
When they see an operating platform that’s designed to make their agency better, not just bigger, the decision changes.
Funding And Performance
When asked about funding and revenue metrics, Witte shared:
Yes. We launched in March 2025 with $10 million in acquisition capital, and in February 2026 we raised $23 million in our Series A, led by Inspired Capital with participation from Equal Ventures, Max Ventures, Genius Ventures, and lending partners. That brings us to about $50 million in total acquisition capital.
In terms of performance, we’ve increased revenue growth across our agencies by nearly 40% and improved bottom-line results by close to 50%. Those outcomes are really a reflection of what happens when you plug strong agencies into better operating infrastructure.
Market Opportunity
When discussing the total addressable market Equal Parts is pursuing, Witte explained:
Insurance distribution is one of the largest unmodernized markets in financial services. There are roughly $2 trillion in premiums and about $215 billion in revenue flowing through approximately 422,000 distributors.
Even after accounting for captive carrier networks and what private equity has already consolidated, there are still about 65,000 independent agencies available for acquisition.
Of those, roughly 40,000 are fully independent, and around 15,000 owners don’t have a clear exit path. That’s really the core of the market for us, strong, relationship-driven agencies that have been underserved by both traditional buyers and legacy technology.
Competitive Differentiation
When asked what differentiates Equal Parts from its competition, Witte emphasized:
A few things, and I’ll keep it straightforward. Most buyers in this space are optimizing for financial engineering, while we’re focused on building operational leverage through infrastructure. That’s a fundamentally different approach.
We’re also not an insurtech. We’re not selling software to agencies and asking them to adopt and maintain it. We own the infrastructure and the agencies running on it.
That’s what gives us the ability to compress integration timelines, standardize operations across the portfolio, and make the compounding effect real rather than theoretical.
Legacy AMS platforms weren’t designed for acquisition or scale. Ours was. That means when we close a deal, we’re not starting from scratch, we’re adding an agency to a system that’s already been refined by every acquisition before it.
The speed and repeatability of that process is something traditional buyers simply can’t match.
And finally, the relationship we build with agency owners is different. We spend time getting to know them long before they’re ready to sell. When the time comes, we’re not another buyer making an offer. We’re the partner they’ve already decided on.
Future Goals
When discussing Equal Parts’ future goals, Witte said:
We’re targeting 25 acquisitions and $1 billion in premiums within the next 24 months, and we intend to be the fastest company in this space to hit that milestone.
The reason we can move that fast isn’t just capital. It’s the platform. Every acquisition we’ve done has made the next one faster, cheaper, and more operationally predictable.
That compounding effect accelerates as the portfolio grows. By the time we’re at agency fifteen or twenty, we’re operating with a level of repeatability and speed that’s very difficult for a traditional buyer to replicate.
Longer term, the vision is to become a top five insurance distributor, powered by an operating platform that compounds leverage across every agency in the portfolio.
The opportunity is massive, the timing is right, and we have the team and the infrastructure to execute.
Insurance’s Generational Transition
When invited to discuss another topic, Witte concluded:
One thing that doesn’t get enough attention outside the industry is the generational transition happening in insurance. About half of all agents are expected to retire in the next decade, and less than 25% of the workforce today is under 35.
That’s a real risk for millions of small businesses and individuals who rely on independent agents to protect their livelihoods.
Equal Parts was built to be part of the solution. We’re preserving agency legacies, keeping teams employed, and maintaining the community relationships those agencies have spent decades building.
And we’re doing it by giving those agencies access to operating infrastructure they couldn’t build on their own.
That’s the part of the mission that motivates me every day.
