We built the infrastructure we could not buy.

I've spent more than two decades solving a puzzle: when a customer is ready to buy, what automatically can identify what they need, match them to the right product, and close the deal?

In the early 2000s, it was digital advertising.

In my 7 years at Unicast Communications, I watched as billions of dollars were spent to create intent, and then went ignored when it came back as a signal.

Nobody was reading what the customer was actually telling you — they were just counting the clicks and hoping the funnel did the rest.

It didn't.

In 2016 I went looking for the hardest iteration of that problem: Insurance.

I led a team to launch a fully licensed digital MGA, architected one of the first on-demand surplus lines platforms, and navigated the complex carrier system.

I stopped to take stock and it looked familiar. Here was the same gap, just with different excuses for ignoring it. Customers were consistently matched with the wrong products, ignoring specific, identifiable needs.

The transaction problem wasn't far behind — the final resting place for any customer that had survived the journey. Intent went ignored, offers were mismatched, and fulfillment was handed to a process that hadn't been redesigned since the fax machine.

Finally, technology became capable of meeting imagination. With embedded commerce, AI agents, and in-platform commerce as the foundation, I started thinking of ways to bridge the gap.

But knowing the gap isn't enough. You need the team that can close it.

Sean McCormick and Zack Bloom built and sold Inbound Media Group to EXL.

They are two of the best performance operators I've ever seen — they know how to move demand at scale, and they've done it before with real exits behind them.

John Pinto was VP of Engineering at Coterie Insurance. He knows exactly where the bodies are buried in insurtech infrastructure — the compliance gaps, the API dead ends, the reasons nobody has done this cleanly at scale.

When they said they were as frustrated with the current system as I was, that told me everything.

The four of us share one conviction: the way digital commerce works today is not the way it has to work. None of us are willing to accept “this is how it is.”

The Embedded Company was built from decades of studying this problem through the lenses of media, engineering, and insurance: a convergence of real-time intent identification, intelligent offer matching, and native transaction infrastructure.