P
Propeller
👤 Aaron Steffey (Aaron sold surety bonds daily as a Philly insurance agent; cousin Chris underwrote them. Both sides of the deal, co-founded.)🌐 siteLinkedIn
An agent and his underwriter cousin turned weeks of surety-bond paperwork into one instant click, then sold to Arch.
Will it work? · our read
Endurance won. Two cousins automated a dull, thin-margin niche of surety the big carriers ignored, reached about $20M in revenue, and sold the whole thing to Arch.
01How the money moves
A contractor needs a surety bond, asks their agent
→
Agent issues it on Propeller: apply, approve, pay by card in minutes
→
Propeller earns commission on every bond issued
02The numbers
Nearly $20MStatedrevenue before Arch deal
early 2024
Sold 100% to Arch Capital, early 2024; figures are frozen near that deal. Practical Founders
Commission on each bond, not SaaS seats. Sold to Arch, 2024.
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Practical Founders #147, Aaron Steffey interview: 'nearly $20 million in revenue', $7M SAFE, Arch salePropeller: automated surety-bond issuance for insurance agentsAaron Steffey, co-founder and co-CEO (LinkedIn)Propeller, company LinkedIn
Revenue is STATED, not filed. The Practical Founders #147 episode writeup (from Aaron Steffey's own interview) says Propeller grew to 'nearly $20 million in revenue' before selling 100% to Arch Capital in early 2024; I confirmed that exact sentence, plus the '$7 million in SAFE notes' line, by reading the page's raw HTML, not a search snippet. It is unaudited, and 'revenue' here is Propeller's commission income as a surety platform, not bond premium volume (GMV). Founding year (2019), Philadelphia, the agent-first no-touch model and '50 states' are on the page and the live propellerbonds.com. Model tagged marketplace because it earns commission per bond across multiple carriers, not SaaS seats. Rival bar heights are my rough read of mindshare, not revenue; I could not open BondExchange (Cloudflare 403), so its anchor is model-based. Post-2024 Propeller is an Arch subsidiary, so the independent-company figures are frozen near the acquisition. We never score you.