If you’ve ever spent hours redlining a PDF only to miss a tiny clause that costs millions, congratulations, you might be an insurance underwriter.

Most startups are born from frustration. Few are born from frustration with insurance contracts.

Enter Maariyaah Afzal, founder of Silas.

Maariyaah grew up in Lisbon, the child of Ugandan-British and Portuguese-Mozambican parents. 

Another of those ‘wanderer-between-worlds’ founders who seem to have become our playbook.

London called, and she answered, landing a graduate role at AIG, the US international insurance and financial services company.

It was perfect: analytical, social, dynamic. Every deal was a crash course in a new industry.

But beneath the buzz of underwriting, she discovered something disturbing: the industry still ran on PDFs, emails, and highlighters. The work she loved was slowed by endless manual checks. 

Being the type who fixes what annoys her, she built a scrappy automation tool to visualize claims and premiums. It helped. However, the tech and the industry were not ready.

Fast forward: she was headhunted by Inigo, a Lloyd’s syndicate specialising in underwriting complex risks for major commercial clients, leveraging data to tackle exposures often avoided by others. This revealed that while a few insurers were beginning to address tech and data gaps, the market at large remained years behind.

Maariyaah loved insurance. She hated its outdated processes. So, she decided to fix them.

In 2024, she launched Silas, an AI-powered platform that streamlines underwriting, making it faster, clearer, and significantly less risky.

Why Silas matters

Insurance might not sound glamorous, but underwriting is where insurers make or lose money. A single missed clause can trigger a multi-million-dollar dispute. An underwriter’s time is the bottleneck to growth. Yet, this critical process remains largely manual.

Silas changes that. Instead of underwriters losing hours on 60-page engineering reports or comparing two contracts line by line, Silas automates the heavy lifting. Think: instant clause checks, smart document comparisons, report summaries, data libraries, and risk intelligence.

And that is just the start.

It’s not “AI for the sake of AI.” It’s: fewer disputes, faster quotes, more time for judgment calls, the things underwriters actually signed up to do.

And insurers are paying attention. Several Tier-1 players in the insurance industry are already piloting Silas.

Why we backed Silas

At Blockchain Founders Capital, we back founders who see the world differently. 

Maariyaah is one of them. She’s lived the pain of outdated underwriting, she’s technical enough to build the solution, and she’s bold enough to take on one of the most conservative industries around.

And she’s not alone. 

Two of the UK’s most respected fintech investors, Alan Morgan, co-founder of MMC Ventures, and Mark Ransford, with deep financial services experience, backed her early and continue to advise her closely. 

Alan calls her “one of the few insurtech founders building with underwriters, not just for them.” Mark has been actively opening doors since day one. When investors of that caliber not only write cheques but lend their reputations, you pay attention.

Her psychometrics say she’s “direct, driven, adventurous.” We didn’t need a test to tell us that. We saw it in every conversation.

Insurance is a €100B+ market still running on legacy workflows. AI adoption is now a top priority in the boardroom. Timing matters, and Silas is in the right place at the right time.

But what excites us most isn’t the market size. It’s Maariyaah’s conviction that insurance doesn’t have to be this painful—and her ability, with Alan, Mark, and a growing team behind her, to build the tools to prove it.

We’re thrilled to join her on this journey. Because sometimes the best companies start with someone looking at a process and saying:

"Surely, there’s a better way."

For more information, visit www.silasinsurtech.com