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(Image source: Kayna.)
Paul Prendergast first made his mark in InsurTech with Blink Parametric (Cork), where he helped demonstrate how insurance could respond in real time to events such as flight delays—often embedded directly in the travel experience itself. With his new venture, Kayna (Cork), Prendergast is extending that same contextual approach beyond product design into distribution, targeting a persistent gap in small business insurance by embedding coverage within the software platforms where those businesses already operate.
“We’ve always been an enabling company for large incumbents,” Prendergast explains. “Insurance is so complicated—you’re better off enabling the people who are already doing a really good job.”
Paul Prendergast, Co-Founder and CEO, Kayna.
At Kayna, that philosophy is applied not to how insurance works, but to how it reaches customers—particularly small businesses, where coverage gaps are widespread and often poorly understood.
From Mobile Security to Parametric Insurance
Prendergast’s path into insurance began outside the industry. After university and a decade in corporate roles, he co-founded a mobile security software company in the pre-iPhone era, eventually layering insurance offerings onto that technology through partnerships with mobile retailers.
That experience led to an early insight into the structure of insurance distribution.
“I remember going into Ace Insurance in London,” he recalls. “There were four people in a room managing a couple of hundred million dollars’ worth of business. I looked around the building and thought, what does everybody else do?”
The observation captured both the efficiency and the opacity of the industry—an environment where significant value is managed through relatively concentrated expertise, but often delivered through complex and indirect channels.
Blink and the Power of Context
Those insights informed the founding of Blink Parametric in 2016. The company’s thesis was straightforward: build a platform enabling insurers to deploy parametric products—policies triggered automatically by predefined events.
But Blink’s impact depended as much on where and how those products were delivered as on how they were designed.
Its best-known use case—flight disruption insurance—was typically embedded in the travel journey, either at the point of purchase or integrated into travel insurance offerings. That positioning allowed Blink to demonstrate a key principle that continues to shape Prendergast’s thinking.
“It’s not about the amount of money you get paid,” he says. “It’s how quickly you resolve the underlying problem.”
In practice, that meant not just issuing payouts, but proactively rebooking flights, arranging accommodation, or providing lounge access—often before travelers realized there was an issue. The combination of real-time data, automated response, and contextual delivery created an experience that differed sharply from traditional claims processes.
Despite its promise, parametric insurance has remained slower to scale than expected outside of certain niches. But for Prendergast, Blink established a durable lesson: insurance delivers the most value when it is both event-driven and embedded in the customer’s moment of need.
A Shock—and a New Focus on Small Business
The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted Blink’s travel-focused business almost overnight, forcing a reassessment of both product and market. Prendergast and his team turned toward small business insurance, where they encountered a different but equally persistent problem.
Paul Prendergast (right) with Kayna and Blink co-founder Peter Bermingham.
Photo credit: Clare Keogh. (Click to enlarge)
Working with insurers such as Beazley, they explored parametric approaches to business interruption, linking payouts to real-time financial data rather than traditional loss adjustment.
The same principle applied: speed and certainty often mattered more than theoretical completeness. “People would prefer $20,000 now,” Prendergast notes, “so they can get their business up and running again.”
More broadly, the team identified a structural gap. Small businesses—despite their importance to the economy—often fall between the industry’s established segments.
“It was kind of the unloved child in insurance,” he says.
The consequences are significant. Many small businesses lack coverage entirely, while others are underinsured or misinsured, often without realizing it until a claim is denied. COVID-era disputes over business interruption coverage brought that issue into sharp relief.
From Product to Distribution: The Kayna Thesis
If Blink demonstrated how insurance could respond more effectively, Kayna focuses on ensuring it is delivered in the right context.
The company’s core insight is the rise of vertical SaaS platforms—industry-specific software systems that increasingly serve as the operational backbone for small businesses. These platforms manage everything from payroll and scheduling to customer acquisition and financial reporting.
“Ten years ago, a small business might have five or six different systems,” Prendergast says. “Now it’s all on one platform. That’s their operating system.”
These environments have already embraced embedded fintech, integrating payments, lending, and banking services directly into workflows. In some cases, those services generate more revenue than the software itself.
Insurance, however, has yet to follow the same path at scale.
Kayna is designed to bridge that gap—connecting insurers with these platforms and enabling coverage to be offered within the flow of day-to-day business activity.
“If you think of it, everything is set up for the broker channel,” Prendergast explains. “We take that layer off the top and put on an embedded layer instead, while keeping all the existing workflows.”
Reducing Friction, Improving Fit
One of the advantages of embedding insurance within SaaS platforms is access to operational data. Because these platforms already capture detailed information about their users, much of the underwriting process can be streamlined. The scale of these platforms—often serving hundreds of thousands of small businesses—has received comparatively little attention as a distribution channel for insurance.
“We’ve taken a 30-page application down to two pages,” Prendergast says.
The data is also more reliable. Rather than relying on self-reported information, insurers can draw on actual business activity, reducing the risk of misrepresentation and improving coverage alignment.
The result is a model that benefits all participants: insurers gain better data, platforms create new revenue streams, and customers receive more relevant, easier-to-access coverage.
Insurance at the Moment of Need
The shift is not only technical but temporal. Traditional insurance distribution is often periodic and detached from operational context. Embedded insurance enables a more responsive model.
“Nobody wakes up looking for insurance,” Prendergast says. “But when you need it, you really need it.”
By integrating with SaaS platforms, Kayna allows insurance to be offered at specific trigger points—when a business hires its first employee, exceeds a revenue threshold, or takes on new risk exposure. The approach echoes Blink’s event-driven model, but applies it to distribution rather than claims.
Scaling Through the Ecosystem
Kayna’s model depends on assembling a network of insurer partners capable of supporting a wide range of industries and risk profiles. The company is integrated with multiple carriers, allowing it to match platform users with appropriate coverage options.
Some use cases require specialist insurers with deep expertise; others benefit from multi-carrier panels offering choice and brand recognition.
“We lean on our insurance partners,” Prendergast says. “They’ve been doing this for 20 years and will be doing it for decades to come. We’re opening up new distribution opportunities for them.”
The approach reinforces a consistent theme in Prendergast’s work: innovation as an overlay on incumbent capabilities, rather than a replacement for them.
AI and the Next Layer of Context
Artificial intelligence is beginning to extend the model further. Kayna is developing tools that analyze existing policies, identify coverage gaps, and guide users toward appropriate solutions.
In franchise systems, for example, incorrect or incomplete coverage at the local level can create liability exposure for the parent organization. Automated analysis can detect these gaps and facilitate corrective action.
Looking ahead, Prendergast expects AI to play a broader role in shaping demand.
“We think every small business is going to have its own financial AI agent,” he says—one that aggregates data, evaluates needs, and recommends products, including insurance.
For insurers, this introduces new requirements around digital readiness. Seamless, API-driven experiences may become essential as purchasing decisions increasingly originate from automated systems rather than human intermediaries.
A Distribution Shift Taking Shape
For Prendergast, Kayna represents a logical extension of the ideas first explored at Blink. If parametric insurance demonstrated how products could be more responsive to events, embedded distribution offers a way to ensure those products are delivered in the right context.
The opportunity is substantial. Vertical SaaS platforms already serve large populations of small businesses, often with daily engagement and deep operational insight.
“It’s a huge channel,” Prendergast says. “Absolutely colossal.”
Whether that channel becomes a dominant mode of distribution will depend on execution—aligning insurers, platforms, and customers around a model that reduces friction while maintaining trust. But as the industry continues to search for more effective ways to serve small businesses, the combination of contextual delivery, better data, and embedded access may prove difficult to ignore.
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Based in New York, Stephen Freeman is a Senior Editor at Trending Insurance News. Previously he has worked for Forbes and The Huffington Post. Steven is a graduate of Risk Management at the University of New York.