Why We Built Rehuman

This is the story of a £40,000 claim, a missing addendum, and four days spent searching for a document that should have been findable in four seconds. It's also the answer to the question I get asked most often: why insurance?

The Incident

In September 2022, the property management company I'd been running for eight years suffered a significant burst pipe incident in one of our managed buildings. The water damage was extensive — two floors, a substantial amount of tenant belongings, and structural drying work that took three weeks. The estimate from the loss adjuster came in at £43,200.

I knew we had the right policy. I'd been running this company since 2014 and I dealt with insurance as a professional matter, not as something I ignored until I needed it. I had a broker. I'd reviewed the policy annually. I was not the kind of person this should happen to.

The problem was an addendum. When we'd renewed our combined buildings policy the previous year, the insurer had issued a new addendum that modified the water damage clause in a way that affected escape-of-water claims over £30,000. The addendum required third-party leak detection certification before a claim at that level would be assessed. My broker had received it. I had received it. It was somewhere in an email chain from eleven months prior. Neither of us had noted it as materially changing the claims process.

Four days. That's how long it took to find the addendum, confirm what it required, commission the required leak detection report (which took another three days), and submit the modified claim package. Fourteen days after we should have had a decision, we were still waiting for the adjuster's review to restart.

The Actual Problem

The claim was eventually paid in full. The addendum requirement was met, the leak detection report was satisfactory, and the settlement was exactly what the estimate had said. We lost two weeks. My tenants lost two weeks of certainty about when the building would be restored. The claim handler lost two weeks of capacity dealing with a case that had already been assessed once.

But the problem wasn't the addendum. The addendum was fine — it was a reasonable procedural requirement for large escape-of-water claims. The problem was that I had no system for knowing that a policy addendum had been received, what it changed, and what it meant for how I would need to handle a claim. The addendum lived in an email attachment. Nothing had connected it to the policy it modified. Nothing had flagged it as changing my obligations.

I asked around and found the same pattern everywhere. My solicitor held the same policy from the same insurer. Her renewal addendum from the same year sat unread in her email. A friend who ran a small restaurant told me he had a rider on his combined liability policy from 2019 that he'd never looked at. These weren't negligent people — they were busy professionals with more important things to read than insurance addenda.

What I Tried First

My first instinct was a folder. A shared folder, with a naming convention, where all policies and addenda would be filed on receipt. I set it up for my property company. It lasted four months before the filing discipline broke down under normal work pressure. The folder existed; the files weren't in it.

The second attempt was a spreadsheet. Policy name, insurer, renewal date, sum insured, key conditions. It was better than the folder — a spreadsheet is quicker to update than a filing system. But it didn't help with the addendum problem, because it tracked the main policy, not the modifications to it. And it was a document I had to maintain, which I didn't, consistently.

The third attempt was asking a fintech friend whether anything existed for insurance aggregation. The answer was essentially: no. There was no Monzo for insurance. There was no equivalent of a brokerage app that showed all your policies in one place with the terms extracted and accessible. The existing "insurance management" apps were premium reminder tools — they told you when to renew, not what your policy said.

The Decision to Build It

I spent six months in 2023 talking to people about the problem. Not pitching — just asking. Individuals, business owners, a few chartered insurance practitioners. The pattern was consistent: most people held three to eight active policies, had poor visibility of what each one covered, and had never done a structured review of their full insurance portfolio. The awareness that this was a solvable problem was low, because most people didn't know what the solved version would look like.

The technology had caught up. Large language models had reached the point where plain-English querying of complex documents was practically achievable. Retrieval-augmented generation — the technique that allows an AI to answer questions by referencing a specific document rather than its training data — was maturing rapidly. Document parsing for financial documents was an established capability at financial services technology companies. Combining these components into a consumer product was a tractable engineering problem, not a research question.

In January 2024 I incorporated Rehuman and hired the first two engineers. The product brief was: give people one place where all their insurance documents live, with the key terms extracted, and with a natural language interface for asking questions about what's covered. Simple to say, six months to build the first version that actually worked on real documents.

What "Rehuman" Means

The name comes from a specific observation about what happened to insurance over the twenty years of digital distribution. Policies got cheaper and faster to buy. The comparison site model drove commoditisation, which drove premium pressure, which drove a focus on policy simplification — but simplification for underwriting purposes, not for customer comprehension. The documents got longer as insurers added more exclusions and conditions to maintain margins on commoditised premiums, while the sales journey got shorter and more frictionless.

The result is a product that feels contemporary — you can buy motor insurance in four minutes on a phone — but behaves like an opaque legal contract the moment anything goes wrong. The customer experience is designed for acquisition, not for the relationship that follows. "Rehuman" is about putting comprehensibility back into that relationship. Making insurance something you can actually understand and engage with, not just pay for and hope you never need.

Where We Are Now

We closed our £1.2M pre-seed round with Fuel Ventures in April 2025. We have 847 users in early access. The product works on the 12 most common UK policy types — home buildings and contents, motor, travel, life, income protection, professional indemnity, public liability, and key cover. The AI assistant answers coverage questions at accuracy rates that are useful for consumer decisions, with explicit source citations so users can verify.

The addendum problem I started with is now a solved case in Rehuman. Upload an addendum PDF, and the platform reads it, identifies what policy it modifies, extracts the changes, and attaches them to the relevant policy record. When you ask a question about that policy, the answer reflects the current terms including all addenda — not just the original schedule.

I wish it had existed in September 2022. We'd have had the claim paid in two days instead of two weeks. More importantly, we'd have noticed the addendum requirement on the day it arrived, not four days into the crisis. That's what the product is for: knowing what you hold, before you need it.