Sasha Haco

Sasha Haco co-founded Unitary in London in 2019 with James Thewlis, now its chief scientist, after the two met on the Entrepreneur First program. Before that she was a theoretical physicist whose Cambridge PhD research on black holes was carried out with Stephen Hawking. Unitary made its name classifying harmful video for platforms such as Trustpilot, Substack and Depop, and raised a $15m (£11m) Series A led by Creandum in October 2023.

From moderation to back-office agents

As co-founder and chief executive, Haco has turned the models Unitary built for content moderation into what it calls Virtual Agents: software that works through the same screens, inboxes and logins as a member of staff, rather than through new integrations. In October 2025 the company launched Virtual Agents for Insurance, covering claims, submissions, renewals, compliance, billing and policy servicing.

Its launch customer was Attune, a US managing general agent (MGA) for small business cover, which used the agents to handle loss run requests end to end. Unitary says Attune reached more than 99% automation and was fully deployed five weeks after kickoff, with costs down 50% and customer satisfaction up 19%.

Haco said at launch that “Virtual Agents require no engineering integration or changes to existing processes while delivering real value, incredibly quickly.”

A route into UK insurance

In 2026 the company has concentrated on the intermediaries that run much of the UK market. In January it became an associate member of the British Insurance Brokers’ Association (BIBA), which represents 1,800 member firms. “Brokers sit at the heart of the UK insurance market, yet many are still weighed down by manual processes and fragmented systems,” Haco said. In July Unitary joined I Love Claims (ILC) as a property corporate partner, and in September it joined the Accelerant Marketplace, which gives more than 300 MGA members a vetted route to its product.

In August it added UK-only and EU-only large language model (LLM) processing through its AWS partnership, so customers can keep data inside their chosen region while the models work on it.

Why it matters to UK buyers

Many insurers, brokers and MGAs run on legacy policy administration systems that are slow and costly to integrate with. An agent that works through the existing user interface lets operations teams automate work they would otherwise send to a business process outsourcing (BPO) provider, without a multi-year IT project. The regional processing option answers the question risk and procurement teams now put to every AI supplier: where does the data go during processing?

Haco has taken a company known for online safety and moved it into one of the most manual corners of UK financial services, with trade body memberships and a marketplace listing to open doors. Named UK deployments are the natural next measure of how far the Attune results travel.