London, 21 October 2026. He turned £40 into a multimillion-pound retail tech business, who also built Britain’s first life insurance app, Bequest, backed by Aviva. He was in the early team at Zego, which became Britain’s first insurtech unicorn. Now, after a year of silence, James Buckley-Thorp is back, and he’s going after the £200bn construction industry and an insurance system that has barely moved on since the fax machine.
His new company, Atlian, uses AI to spot every construction project in Britain from the moment it’s planned, often before a spade hits the ground, and puts it straight in front of the brokers who insure it. The ambition is as big as it sounds: every building in Britain, before it exists.
Fuel Ventures has led Atlian’s pre-seed round, alongside SyndicateRoom’s Access EIS, a data-driven super angel fund; the GI Network (GIN); and angel investors including Chris Mairs CBE, who co-founded Metaswitch, the telecoms software company Microsoft bought in 2020. Mairs now backs early-stage founders as a Venture Partner at Entrepreneur First and is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. Mark James, Syndicate Lead, GI Network, said: “We wanted our first investment to show exactly what our members can back: a founder who has done it before, going after a huge market that technology has barely touched. Atlian is that company.” The round is the first investment by GI Network, a newly formed UKBAA-accredited angel syndicate backed by a 3000 strong professional investor community. The funding takes Atlian through its commercial launch, deepens its construction data and brings in its first senior hire: a head of sales from the broker market.
Construction is one of Britain’s biggest industries and one of the last still insured by phone, email and PDF. More than 728,000 projects are live across the country at any one time, yet brokers often hear about a job only after a rival has got there first. Submissions are stitched together by hand and lost in crowded inboxes, and good projects stall before they break ground. Atlian turns weeks of chasing into minutes.
And it’s moving fast. Its first brokers come on board in November, and WhoWritesThis.co.uk, the free market finder Atlian built for brokers, has handled nearly 1,000 searches since launching this month. Insurance Age picked it up within days.
James Buckley-Thorp, founder and CEO of Atlian, said:
“I went quiet for a year because I was looking for a problem big enough to spend the next decade on. Construction is it. Britain builds £200bn a year and still insures it like it’s 1995. AI has come for lawyers and bankers. The building site is next, and Atlian will see every building in Britain before it exists.”
Mark Pearson, Founder & Managing Partner at Fuel Ventures, said:
“We’re thrilled to lead Atlian’s pre-seed round and back James. Having built multiple successful tech businesses and raised over £17m across his career, he is uniquely positioned to take on the massive opportunity in construction insurance. Britain builds £200bn a year and it’s an industry ripe for AI-driven transformation. Atlian is building the critical software layer that will power this market, and we’re excited to support them on this journey.”
