How many times have you been waiting on the phone and heard “please stay on hold, an agent will be with you shortly,” only to be forced to wait a period of time that is in no way short? Toronto-based General Magic wants to help solve that problem in the insurance industry.
“This is how the Fortune 500 becomes AI-native. Not by rebuilding from scratch, but by bridging the gap between old data and new intelligence.”
Sanjana Basu,
Radical Ventures
The agentic AI startup’s texting agent dynamically interacts with insurance companies’ customers as they file insurance claims and ask about their coverage, saving them from having to wait to connect to a customer service line.
The startup says its agents work across the full insurance lifecycle—pre-quote eligibility, post-quote engagement, and claims coordination—which it claims can result in a 30-percent cut in call volume that can save companies more than 250 hours per month.
On Tuesday morning, General Magic announced it secured $7.2 million USD ($9.9 million CAD) to build out its tech and bring it to market. The round was led by Toronto-based venture firm Radical Ventures, with “significant participation” from a16z Speedrun, and investment from angel investors including Figma VP of Product Brendan O’Driscoll and OpenAI’s Larry James Erwin.
The raise brings General Magic’s total funding to date up to $8.4 million USD, having previously secured funding from the likes of Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez.
The funding will be used to expand General Magic’s team, improve its product, and ramp up go-to-market efforts, General Magic head of growth Aaron Anandji told BetaKit in a text message. Anandji added that the company still plans to run “lean” (it currently has six employees, including the two founders), but will hire “where it makes sense.”
Most of the world’s financial and insurance data is “locked inside rigid, legacy systems that were never designed for the AI era,” Radical partner Sanjana Basu explained in an email statement to BetaKit, adding that, by building a reasoning layer that sits on top of those existing systems, General Magic is “unlocking a massive amount of trapped value.”
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“This is how the Fortune 500 becomes AI-native,” Basu said. “Not by rebuilding from scratch, but by bridging the gap between old data and new intelligence.”
General Magic was founded as OpenSesame in 2024 by Jai Mansukhani and Anthony Azrak, who intended to help companies add and manage agentic AI capabilities in their software products. After participating in Andreessen Horowitz’s famed accelerator program, a16z speedrun, last year, OpenSesame rebranded to General Magic earlier this month with a renewed focus on insurance.
The a16z speedrun program offers $1 million USD ($1.36 million CAD) in equity, access to millions of dollars in credits for software and AI tools, and hands-on mentorship and networking with one of the world’s most prominent venture firms.
Disclosure: Aaron Anandji, General Magic’s head of growth, is an occasional freelance writer for BetaKit.
Feature image courtesy General Magic.