Jenn Knight has been obsessed with the building blocks of engineering since childhood, deconstructing and reconstructing whatever she could get her hands on.
That passion for solving the unsolvable would eventually propel her to the forefront of the insurance industry's producer license compliance challenges.
Today, she is the chief technology officer and co-founder of AgentSync, a role she stepped into after building systems for a long list of tech titans.
Her husband and partner, Niji Sabharwal, launched with the goal to help revolutionize the manual insurance space into a digital one, which they very lucratively accomplished. It only took five years after launching in 2018 for them to grow their kitchen-table startup into a massive $1.2 billion unicorn.
But one puzzle she can’t seem to solve has followed her throughout her time working in tech. Knight is fiercely dedicated to building a diverse team at AgentSync, especially within engineering and product departments, as it makes for better products and companies.
Another major factor behind this push is her own lived experience.
As she told Built In, she “has experienced environments where it is difficult to have my voice heard.” Raising a daughter of her own, she believes it is essential to productively reduce the gender wage gap and promote representation throughout the industry.
Each move Knight makes seems to create waves of change everyone wants to ride.
The Tinkerer
Knight’s childhood in Petaluma, California, was spent outside, enjoying the sunshine and biking through fields.
But the budding engineer in her was always more fascinated with how things worked than with simply playing with them. She preferred taking apart toys to playing with them. This curiosity found its true north when she gained early access to a home computer. She found pure joy in experimenting with the building blocks of the machine’s operating system.
Her innate curiosity and instant comfort with tech were early indications of how far her skills would take her.
After graduating from Boston University magna cum laude in international relations and minoring in French, Knight landed her first job with Borrego Solar. Despite lacking a background in computer science, it was here where she learned how to code and rediscovered her love for the technical. She realized very quickly that this would be the rest of her life’s work.
Each new tech job taught her how to be a well-rounded leader. Salesforce taught her the “problem statement” and having a deep understanding of a client's problem, while LinkedIn gave her the confidence to be a successful salesperson. And in her early work at Bluewolf, a consulting company, she was introduced to “a lot of pattern matching” – like things that can make and break a startup.
But she was not ready for what life would throw at her next.
A Hard Lesson and Billion Dollar Idea
While the duo had found success in their respective fields, her partner was about to encounter a crisis that would change their trajectory.
Sabharwal was an early employee at the infamous startup Zenefits. In 2015, his leaked emails exposed compliance failures, triggering a federal crackdown. The company, once a $4.5 billion tech darling, now faced millions of dollars in fines.
Once the dust had settled, they both knew there had to be a way to solve this niche issue. She saw how insurance was still mainly operating through archaic manual processes and believed they could create “something that could be introspective with technology and also help folks scale more effectively.”
“I do think there is a bit about founding that is the definition of insanity,” she told Insurtech Insights. “We saw this problem, he had lived it, and we had built systems together in the past, so we knew we really liked building things together.”
Sabharwal left Zenefits in 2018, and the two officially launched AgentSync the same year. After such a hard lesson, they wanted to make something that would streamline the connection between insurance carriers and insurance brokers, as well as automate the compliance process by directly connecting to the databases of regulatory governing bodies.
Initially, Knight kept her job at Stripe to maintain stability, dedicating nights and weekends to building the prototype alongside her husband, who had made it his full-time endeavor.
After working out of their home in San Francisco for 18 months, they believed it was time for a change. Her husband became excited about the possibilities of moving to a more affordable startup space like Colorado, with Knight eventually agreeing to the move in April 2020.
Pregnant Fundraising
They weren’t exactly organized with their move, arriving without even having internet set up for the two virtual pitches scheduled the next day. The couple now faced a mortgage, no paycheck, and a new, life-changing surprise: Knight was pregnant – a reality that seemed to clash with the intensity of their fundraising goals.
She ended up being grateful for the world’s reliance on video calls during the coronavirus pandemic.
“When we were a visionary seed, I was 3 1/2 months pregnant and violently ill,” she recalled in an interview with Advancing Women in Tech. “We were literally pitching in our kitchen. And I was like, 'I'm either going to faint, or I'm going to vomit.'”
She found herself quickly moving out of frame to throw up in a corner while her husband did his best to stay straight-faced and keep the meeting going. But, like every mother in the industry, she powered through, even avoiding the negative experiences many women face, again, thanks to COVID-19.
“I didn't experience any very direct and blatant bias because I was a woman, but that period of time when everybody was pitching over Zoom was actually much better for women,” she went on to tell the publication’s founder, Nancy Wang. “I know of another woman founder who was pregnant while pitching, and no one got to know. We didn't have to deal with what would probably be a series of rejections based on the fact that we were going to disappear because, heaven forbid, we had a child.”
Knight gave birth to their daughter in 2020, the same year she left her job at Stripe to commit to AgentSync full time. Amid the insanity, their idea began to gain traction, even as COVID-19 sent other startups into a tailspin.
The industry's desperate need for digital transformation meant AgentSync's service was vital and perfectly timed. They saw a tenfold increase in valuation in just eight months. Then, in 2021, they closed a $75 million Series B round, achieving “unicorn” status with a $1.2 billion valuation.
An Institutional Problem
Reflecting on being a woman and mother in a historically male-dominated field like tech infrastructure, she admits she doesn’t have a simple answer for how to get more women involved.
Today, her main passion is trying to raise a good human and enjoying time with her now-4-year-old.
While she believes sharing experiences can have a true impact, she is not hopeful about the immediate future. “I have a very young daughter and think about this a lot,” she went on to tell Advancing Women in Tech in the same interview.
She adds that it isn’t just about women putting in the work; it’s also about men actively supporting women – a shift that might take generations. Right now, she notes, the capital and power are not aligned with women – a reality that needs to be stated plainly.
“If we don't say that out loud, and start to think about how we can change that, it's not going to change,” she continued. “The opportunities that my daughter will have will be fundamentally different from those that are accessible to me.”
“It's not magically and dramatically going to get better anytime soon. We're not going to do it alone. This is a massive institutional challenge.”
So Knight continues her life's work: taking apart broken systems, whether in code or in culture, and rebuilding them to work better for everyone.
.png)
.png)
.png)
