About us

The story and the people behind Avanew.

Avanew builds conversational AI insurance advisors: CLAIR for cyber and a growing line of Conversational P&C Advisors.

Who we are

Mission

Avanew builds conversational AI advisors for work that runs on hard questions. Each one is a specialist you can talk to, that answers from approved sources and shows where the answer came from, so the people who use it can trust it and check it.

Purpose

Brokers, underwriters and insureds spend their days answering questions that are hard to get right and costly to get wrong. Avanew exists to put a capable advisor beside them: one that answers in the moment, trains them between moments, and leaves the judgment where it belongs, with the professional.

Origin

Avanew grew out of decades spent in property and casualty insurance and more than a decade building interactive AI platforms. It brings the two together: conversational advisors for insurance work, built by people who know that work from the inside.

Our people

Our founders bring the range serious products need, from operations and engineering to legal and strategy.

Co-Founder & COO
Tim Kinsella
Tim has spent more than three decades where insurance, risk and technology meet. At AIG he was Senior Vice President of Operations and Systems across the Property, Casualty and Marine divisions, including National Union’s management and executive liability business, and led AIG’s Advanced Energy Solutions business.
He went on to bring catastrophe, climate and cyber risk models to insurers and reinsurers across the U.S., London and Bermuda at CoreLogic and RMS, after years of insurance consulting at Ernst & Young. At Avanew he runs operations and keeps every engagement moving. He holds an MBA from NYU Stern.
- Operations
- P&C insurance
- Risk modeling
Co-Founder & CTO
Chan Chawla
Chan has led technology teams for more than two decades. He is the founder and CEO of Primotech, a global technology and AI consulting company that has delivered more than 1,500 projects for startups, growing businesses and enterprises across a dozen industries.
At Avanew he owns the AI systems behind every advisor: multi-agent architectures, retrieval-grounded knowledge, conversational avatars and cloud deployment on AWS, Azure and GCP, with governance and compliance built in. Earlier he was CTO and Director of SoftProdigy and Vice President of Technology at A-1 Technology.
- AI architecture
- Engineering
- Cloud and security
Co-Founder & General Counsel
Sunjay Sterling
Sunjay is a tax and corporate attorney with more than 15 years of practice across government, law firms and the financial industry. He founded Sunjay Sterling, Attorney at Law, PLLC, counseling corporations, partnerships, nonprofits and individuals, including insurance and financial companies, on tax, corporate and business law.
He has practiced in Colorado, Washington, Illinois, Michigan and Tokyo, has written widely for the American Bar Association, and holds a J.D. and an LL.M. in Taxation from the University of Denver. At Avanew he guides contracts, privacy and the responsible use of AI.
- Contracts
- Privacy
- Responsible AI
Board Member & AI Strategist
Jae McKinney
Jae is a conversational AI specialist who advises Avanew on AI strategy and helps shape its vision. He brings more than 30 years in property and casualty insurance, plus the skills of Divigner Group, which he founded in 2011 and grew from a digital marketing agency into an AI agency.
Most recently he was Enterprise AI Product Manager for Allied World, defining a conversational policy assistant for underwriters and taking three Proof of Value initiatives to production approval. His cybersecurity experience comes from Infiniqo, where he has served as Chief Product Officer for nearly nine years.
- Conversational AI
- AI strategy
- Vision