He’s the CEO of Honeycomb Insurance, an AI-native insurer specializing in apartment buildings and condo associations. The company raised a $40 million funding round led by Zeev Ventures, Fortune learned exclusively. Ibex Investors, Peakline, Alpha Partners, Meitar Partners, Practical VC, and NFL Super Bowl champion, former 49ers player Harris Barton also joined. The raise brings total funding to $95 million—a figure that is deliberately modest, according to Ben-Zaken.

Honeycomb’s platform ingests hundreds of data points per property—geospatial datasets, aerial imagery, building history—to price each risk individually, without a physical inspection. That lets the company offer coverage up to 40% cheaper for well-maintained buildings that traditional carriers either overcharge or pass on. Its customers are the landlords, condo associations, and HOA boards managing multi-unit residential housing.

“We’ve created a machine that can deeply assess risk at almost zero variable cost, and it’s continuing to learn,” Ben-Zaken told me.

The company ended 2025 with $275 million in gross written premium (the total volume of insurance premiums a company books), covered more than $100 billion in total insured value across 22 states, and is already profitable. “We are cash flow positive,” Ben-Zaken said. “But just like Amazon in the early days, everything we generate in profit we’re thinking about how to funnel back into building something bigger.”

Ben-Zaken, a Wharton MBA and Israeli military intelligence veteran, cofounded Honeycomb in 2019 alongside CTO Nimrod Sadot. The company came together after Ben-Zaken’s first startup, Comprendi, went under—felled by competing against Google and Meta. The lesson he drew: find a market that’s large, fragmented, and one where legacy players are competent but technologically vulnerable. 

U.S. commercial real estate insurance fit the bill. The U.S. multifamily insurance segment alone is worth over $34 billion a year. About 30% of Americans live in apartment buildings or condos, yet major insurers have largely retreated from the segment after getting burned by weather-related losses. The ones that stayed have a blind spot: when you’re writing a $5,000 policy, you can’t afford to send someone to inspect the building—so a well-kept 1970s walk-up and a crumbling one down the street get priced the same.

But the market that gave Honeycomb its opening is becoming crowded. Commercial property premiums climbed for six years, peaking near 20% annual increases in 2023, as carriers spooked by natural disaster losses pulled back capacity and raised prices. That retreat let a company like Honeycomb in the door. Now the dynamic is reversing. A quieter 2025 hurricane season and an influx of new capital into the reinsurance market—the backstop insurers buy to cover their own catastrophic losses—has pushed rates down 5% to 15% for apartment building coverage, with reinsurance costs falling 6.7% in 2025 alone. 

Ben-Zaken argues Honeycomb has a different lever to pull. “In a soft market, you play more on the elements that are less related to price,” he said. “The fact that an agent can sell five policies from Honeycomb in the same time as one policy elsewhere—that’s still an advantage.”

Ben-Zaken’s benchmark is Neptune, the flood insurer that went public last October at a roughly $2.8 billion valuation on around $400 million in gross written premiums (GWP). “On the GWP side, we’re not very far from them,” Ben-Zaken said. “We’ll cross $500 million in the next couple of years. At that scale, I think we’ll be in the right zone.”

See you tomorrow,

Lily Mae Lazarus
X: @LilyMaeLazarus
Email: lily.lazarus@fortune.com
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VENTURE DEALS

- Impulse Space, a Redondo Beach, Calif.-based developer of vehicles that move payloads across and between orbits, raised $500 million in Series D funding. 137 Ventures and BANNER VC led the round.

- AlphaSense, a New York City-based AI-powered market intelligence platform, raised $350 million in funding. Vitruvian Partners, Accenture Ventures, and J.P. Morgan Asset Management led the round and were joined by D. E. Shaw Ventures, Pinegrove Opportunity Partners, and others.

- Coralogix, a Boston, Mass.-based data and AI platform for observability, raised $200 million in Series F funding. Advent, CPPIB, and Greenfield led the round and were joined by Brighton Park Capital.

- Quobly, a Grenoble, France-based quantum computing company, raised €115 million ($133.4 million) in Series A funding. STMicroelectronics, Bpifrance, and SEALSQ led the round.

- Wordsmith, an Edinburgh, Scotland-based legal AI company, raised $70 million in Series B funding from Highland Europe and Index Ventures.

- Forage, a San Francisco-based payments infrastructure company that enables merchants to accept government benefits, raised $40 million in Series B funding. Mouro Capital led the round and was joined by PayPal Ventures and others.

- Semble, a London, U.K.-based electronic health record and practice management software provider for private healthcare providers, raised £30 million ($40.2 million) in Series C funding. Revaia led the round and was joined by Partech and existing investors.

- Apoha, a London, U.K.-based molecular behavior data and physical-world AI company, raised $36 million in funding. Singular VC led the round.

- Lassie, a San Francisco-based developer of AI agents that automate administrative operations for small medical practices, raised $35 million in Series A funding. a16z led the round and was joined by others.

- Arpio, a Durham, N.C.-based disaster recovery and resilience platform for Amazon Web Services environments, raised $15 million in Series A funding. S3 and Paladin Capital Group led the round.

- Offroad, a New York City and Tel Aviv, Israel-based identity security platform, raised $7 million in seed funding. Ibex Investors and Skywell Capital Partners led the round.

- Kodesage, a London, U.K. and Budapest, Hungary-based AI platform designed for modernizing legacy enterprise software, raised $6.6 million in seed funding. VentureFriends led the round and was joined by Portfolion and angel investors.

- AethexAI, a San Francisco and London, U.K.-based voice AI company targeting Africa and the Middle East, raised $3 million in pre-seed funding. 4DX Ventures led the round and was joined by Enza Capital, Dorm Room Fund, Mojo Ventures, Stanford GSB 26 Fund, and angel investors.

PRIVATE EQUITY

- Harbor Global, a portfolio company of BayPine, acquired CE Global Partners, a Cheshire, U.K.-based HR & payroll services firm. Financial terms were not disclosed.

- MBK Partners acquired ALTEMIRA Holdings, a Tokyo, Japan-based aluminum holding company, from Apollo Global Management. Financial terms were not disclosed.

- PAI Partners agreed to acquire a majority stake in Arlettie, a Paris, France-based omnichannel inventory management platform for luxury brands. Financial terms were not disclosed.

- Sheridan Capital Partners acquired a majority stake in Tres Health, a Boca Raton, Fla.-based employer-facing insurance platform. Financial terms were not disclosed.

- WestView Capital Partners acquired a minority stake in Helio Health Group, a Morristown, N.J.-based AI-powered consulting and compliance company for life sciences companies. Financial terms were not disclosed.

EXITS

- Littlejohn & Co. acquired Milrose Consultants, a New York City-based consulting, engineering and architecture services provider, from Southfield Capital. Financial terms were not disclosed.

IPOS

- CopperTech Metals, a New York City-based copper producer and spinoff of Vedanta Holdings, filed to go public on the New York Stock Exchange. The company posted $1.3 billion in sales for the year ended March 31. 

FUNDS + FUNDS OF FUNDS

- Wingman Growth Partners, a Greenwich, Conn.-based private equity firm, raised $215 million for its first fund focused on software, data, and financial technology companies.