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At 20, the founder and CEO of Fidaris is building AI infrastructure to give health insurance brokerages another path to growth beyond hiring more people or buying other firms.
For years, a health insurance brokerage that wanted to grow had two familiar choices: add more people or acquire another agency. In-Woo Park believes that model is missing a third option, and he is building Fidaris to prove it.
“The old growth model was pretty simple,” Park said. “If a brokerage wanted more capacity, it either hired more people or bought another book of business. I think AI gives the industry a third path.”
Park is the founder and CEO of Fidaris, a software company building a platform for the next generation of health insurance brokerages. His focus is on employer health benefits, a large service industry that has yet to be rebuilt around AI. In his view, brokerages have spent years limited by the amount of work a human team can handle. Fidaris is designed to change that equation.
The company’s model has two parts. The first is augmentation. AI works alongside the brokerage team, handling repetitive tasks so employees can focus on strategy, client relationships, and complex judgment calls. Park sees that as part of a larger shift happening across service businesses, where AI is beginning to multiply what each person can produce.
“Augmentation is about giving people hours back,” Park said. “If the work is repetitive and does not require the full judgment of the broker, there is no reason it should consume the best part of someone’s day.”
The second part is what Park calls auto-pilot. Instead of only helping a person work faster, the system owns entire workflows and escalates to a human when judgment or client meetings are required. That distinction matters because it changes the economics of a brokerage. Augmentation gives a team more time. Auto-pilot gives the firm a different kind of capacity.
“Auto-pilot is not just another assistant,” Park said. “It is a system that can handle the bulk of servicing work, then bring the human back in when the human is actually needed.”
That is the idea behind Fidaris. Park wants brokerages to become AI-native, not by removing the human broker, but by removing the work that keeps brokers from doing the highest-value parts of the job.
“The human relationship is still the point,” Park said. “The problem is that too much of the day gets swallowed by work that does not require that relationship. If we can clear that out, the broker can spend more time being strategic.”
Park is new to insurance brokering. He sees it as part of why he can hold the vision he has. His background touches several parts of healthcare, including pharmacy, antimicrobial research, medtech, and health-tech, but employer benefits brokering was newer ground. That outsider view helped him question assumptions that may feel fixed inside the industry.
“Being new to the space has been useful,” Park said. “I did not grow up inside the rules of how brokerages are supposed to operate, so I could ask why certain limits were treated as permanent.”
His healthcare path started early. At 15, Park got his first job at a local community pharmacy. At 17, he made an antibiotic combination discovery that led to his first Big Pharma internship at Novartis. At 18, he built his first tech startup to help pharmacists resolve drug shortages, then worked with a professor at the University of Toronto to help scale an algorithm that predicts drug shortages with the highest accuracy in Canada. That same year, he joined MedMe Health as a product engineer, building AI voice agents for pharmacies.
By 19, Park had dropped out of Minerva University after one month to found his second company. He raised a pre-seed round from Entrepreneur First in San Francisco. In 2025, he was selected as one of 32 Masason Foundation members internationally, joining a foundation funded by Masayoshi Son of SoftBank that supports young people pursuing large ideas.
Park’s age has opened doors and closed them. He said the hardest challenge early on was being taken seriously as a 19-year-old founder in a regulated, relationship-driven industry. Insurance and healthcare do not usually reward people who arrive without decades of conventional credibility.
“It was difficult to get some conversations at first,” Park said. “People look at your age and make assumptions. I had to earn my way into rooms by showing that I was doing the work.”
He did that by studying the industry publicly and immersing himself in real brokerage environments. He read contracts, studied workflows, spoke with operators, and learned how work actually moves through brokerages. Posting his learnings helped him educate others in the industry and gave him a way to build credibility without waiting for permission.
That process also helped him recruit advisors who could open opportunities that would have been nearly impossible for a young founder to reach alone. For Park, that is part of the founder’s job.
“You bring in people who are the best at what they do,” he said. “A founder should not pretend to know everything. The job is to ask for what you need and build around people who raise the level.”
Park’s ambition for Fidaris is not only about software adoption. He believes a major shift is coming in the way health insurance brokerages compete. The firms that work in the employer’s best interest, the ones he calls fiduciary brokerages, are the ones he believes will win over the next decade. But that transition takes more than good intentions. It requires systems that let those firms scale without losing depth.
“The mission is bigger than making brokerages more efficient,” Park said. “If the right firms can scale, then better advice can reach more employers. That eventually affects the people healthcare is supposed to serve.”
That is the larger bet behind Fidaris. Park is building for an industry where capacity has often meant headcount, and where better advice can be limited by the number of people available to do the work. His goal is to build the infrastructure that lets brokerages grow differently.
“I do not think the future brokerage looks like the old brokerage with a chatbot attached,” Park said. “I think it is a new operating model. AI handles the work it should handle, and people are freed up to do the work only people can do.”
For more information on In-Woo Park, visit his LinkedIn.
