Sterling Brokers, a Toronto employee benefits brokerage and third-party administrator, has acquired Lucite, a New York startup that makes AI software for benefits brokers. The deal was announced on November 6, 2026, in a release distributed by Business Wire with a Toronto dateline.
Terms were not disclosed. Jason Spector, Lucite's co-founder and chief executive, will stay on to run Lucite's expanded offering inside Sterling. The companies did not say how many Lucite employees are joining, and Sterling did not say whether Lucite would keep operating under its own name.
What Lucite built
Lucite was founded in 2024 and went through Y Combinator's Winter 2024 batch, according to a profile of YC companies on Altss. Its software is designed for the paperwork that sits behind group benefits plans in Canada: it pulls information out of documents sent by insurance carriers, prepares quotes, manages renewals and produces reports that brokers hand to their clients.
Caplight describes the company as an AI-native software provider that ingests, extracts and analyzes carrier documents for insurance brokers and benefits advisors. According to the release, Lucite's analytics and reporting platform is already used by more than 45 brokers who together serve more than 20,000 clients across Canada.
The release said Lucite's founders had worked on AI at Datadog, Meta and SpaceX.
“Canadian companies are best served by a diverse, independent broker network.”
Why Sterling is buying
Sterling was founded in 2014 and runs both a brokerage and a benefits administration business. It was an early partner of Lucite and one of its largest customers before the acquisition.
A third-party administrator runs the day-to-day mechanics of an employer's benefits plan, such as enrolling employees, processing changes and dealing with carriers, while the broker advises the employer on which plan to buy. Small independent brokers often lack their own administration systems, which is the gap Sterling said it wants to fill by opening its platform to them alongside Lucite's software.
The deal is meant to take Sterling beyond its own brokerage and turn it into a supplier of technology and administration services to independent brokers across the country. The combined product puts Lucite's AI analytics together with Sterling's administration systems, so brokers can get analytics, benefits administration and automated carrier quoting in one place. As part of the move, Sterling said its proprietary third-party administration platform would be offered to independent brokers for the first time.
Andrew Blanchard, Sterling's chief executive, argued that Canadian employers do best when they have a wide choice of independent brokers, and said the deal would let Sterling give brokers of all sizes enterprise-grade tools whatever their size. Spector said independent brokers needed better technology to compete with bigger rivals, and that pairing a startup's speed with Sterling's infrastructure and distribution would make that possible.
The founders and the funding
Lucite was co-founded by Spector, its chief executive, and Richard Greenbaum, its chief technology officer, according to Caplight. The company is headquartered in New York City even though its product is aimed at the Canadian market.
Lucite was backed by Y Combinator and Outbound Capital. Caplight lists $500,000 in total funding from a single seed round in 2024, with those two firms as investors; the size of the round itself was not separately disclosed. The Altss profile lists a team of four. Neither company disclosed revenue or a valuation.
What happens to brokers
The release did not describe any change for brokers who already use Lucite. It said the expanded platform would combine Lucite's existing analytics with Sterling's administration and quoting tools, and that Spector would lead that offering.
Because Sterling was already one of Lucite's largest customers, the buyer knew the product before it bought the company. The release presented the deal as a way to bring that software, together with Sterling's own administration systems, to a wider group of independent brokers.
Sterling did not disclose its own size, revenue or number of clients in the release, and it gave no timeline for when independent brokers outside its existing network would be able to sign up for the combined platform.
