Company Overview
Ken Zamkow is Co-Founder & CCO at Nolana AI, an AI-native operating system designed to automate complex insurance operations while maintaining human oversight. Learn more at https://nolana.com/.
Can you tell us a little about your background before starting at your company?
We are two co-founders who are also brothers! We started our first fintech startup together more than 20 years ago. After we exited that company, we each went to different cities for business school, and ended up on different paths. Ty moved to London, and took on technical product roles at Google and Amazon, where he led large scale projects for Alexa and Prime Video. Ken moved to New York, and led business development at a number of exited startups, one of them was most recently acquired by Nvidia. Last year we decided it was time for us to work together again.
How did you start at your company? What were the first steps you took to get it off the ground and how did you identify the need for your product/service in the market?
The idea for Nolana’s AI insurance workflows came from seeing first-hand how fragmented and manual insurance operations still are, especially in complex enterprise environments.
Through our early engagement with Deloitte and Zurich Insurance, we gained a clearer understanding of the operational pain points: disconnected systems, legacy workflows, heavy human coordination, slow claims and underwriting processes, and limited visibility across the lifecycle of a case. It became obvious that simply throwing a generic AI toolkit at the problem or layering chatbots on top wasn’t enough.
That shaped our conviction that what was needed was a unified agentic platform specifically built for insurance, that could orchestrate decisions, automate structured processes in all touchpoints for customers and employees, and keep humans in control where judgment matters.
Nolana was built out of that insight – to bring clarity, automation, and accountability into complex insurance workflows.
What innovations or unique features set your company apart from others in the industry?
At Nolana we built a customizable agentic AI platform with modules for dynamic FNOL, claims decisioning, reserve and subrogation analysis, and customer service.
We believe that in order to really improve efficiency in insurance ops, we need components that can both analyze large volumes of data/documents AND manage communications between numerous stakeholders at the same time. This combination, along with our strong emphasis on accurate, practical, and user friendly modules is what sets us apart.
We were just accepted to the latest cohort of the Lloyd’s Lab, which is considered the best insurance technology accelerator in the world. Although the program just started, the level of access it has given us to the market and to data that is not publicly available is incredible, that hardly any startups and technology companies get.
What has been the most effective strategy for scaling your business?
Insurance is a relationship business. We found that leveraging contacts in the space, finding the right accelerators, and connecting with the right investors has had huge impact. Getting into the Lloyd’s Lab that we mentioned previously, in combination with joining the right insurtech organizations and participating in Plug and Play’s NJ Fast insurtech/fintech accelerator, has allowed us to grow our qualified pipeline faster in just the past few months than we otherwise would have in 1-2 years.
Looking ahead, what are your goals for the future of your company?
In the rest of 2026 will continue to expand our platform with even more agentic AI workflows, including complex multi-insurer and reinsurance workflows based on our work with the Lloyd’s market. We plan to continue onboarding additional insurers to our platforms and promote making claims faster and painless across the industry.
