“I love the business of risk,” Jonathan Crystal tells me. He didn’t really have a choice. After a brief career as a consultant, he joined his family’s insurance brokerage firm, Crystal & Company, rising through the ranks to become CFO in 2014 before helping broker a sale to Alliant in 2018.
But despite spending his career in insurance, Crystal was always frustrated with how slow it moved, joking that the only thing his grandfather would be surprised by now about the industry would be email. So he decided to try out a different kind of risk, setting out to start a venture firm just as AI began to upend the staid sector. His new operation, the New York-based Crystal Venture Partners, just closed its first $33 million fund, backed by an array of family offices and global insurance companies.
