This week, Openly, INSTANDA and SortSpoke all raised new rounds of venture capital financings. Novidea and Certificial formed a partnership. Gigaforce debuted a bot. Reliance Global Group is now nearly national.
Openly, an insurtech MGA focused on upscale homeowners’ insurance, closed a $75 million venture capital round. Plans call for using the money to start expanding into other insurance sectors.
The Series C investment attracted new and returning venture capital investors such as Advance Venture Partners, Clocktower Ventures, Obvious Ventures, Gradient Ventures, PGJ Ventures, Techstars and Mtech. For the first time, independent insurance agency owners themselves also participated.
The Boston, Mass.-based company said it would use the money to expand its home insurance product to more states and insurance agencies. It will also continue to work on improving its technology and offerings.
Openly launched two and a half years ago, and currently offers its products in 19 states, through a rapidly growing network of more than 17,000 independent insurance agents. The company claims to enjoy annual net policy retention that surpasses 90%.
Openly’s technology relies on algorithms that allow its rating models to look at more data with greater granularity and provide more accurate coverage options.
Recently, it announced plans to enter the reinsurance market.
INSTANDA, developer of a no-code insurance platform, has raised $45 million to enhance the platform’s capabilities.
Europe’s Toscafund led the round, and existing investor Dale Ventures also participated.
The money will be used to boost the platform’s capabilities, with a priority on billing, claims and product accelerators, particularly for the US and Canadian markets.
The company also plans to expand its product presence through the building of ISO, NCCI and AAIS product templates. This will allow INSTANDA to support personal, commercial and specialty products for admitted and non-admitted insurers.
INSTANDA previously raised $19.5 million in early 2020.
Novidea is partnering with Certificial with the goal of transforming the legacy process of certificate of insurance (COI) issuance into a modern digital process.
Novidea revolves around a cloud-based, data-driven CRM platform for brokers, agents and MGAs. Certificial developed a COI platform that uses real-time data to make sure businesses have continuous, compliant coverage.
The partnership enables Certificial’s COI platform to work natively in the Novidea Agency management platform, with the goal of making certificate issuance seamless and more efficient.
“Certificial is thrilled to partner with Novidea, a company that shares many similar values to us,” Certificial co-founder and CEO Peter Teresi said in prepared remarks. “Both Novidea and Certificial are working to drive innovation in the insurance industry through technology and partnerships, and we’re proud that Novidea chose us to be their partner for native certificate issuance.”
SortSpoke has raised $4.5 million in new financing designed to help further growth of its AI technology that extracts data from unstructured documents.
Plans call for using the money to boost sales and marketing in the insurance and lending verticals.
IDEA Fund Partners, SixThirty Ventures and an unnamed insurance carrier led the round.
Founded by Jasper Li in 2017, the Toronto-based company has a universal intelligent document processing platform that can turn unstructured documents into structured data, with an aim to make automation of data entry work easier. The company said it depends on proprietary machine learning technology that lets enterprises train in less than a day on how to extract any data from any document type, in any language.
Gigaforce recently debuted its new claims intake bot – Gigabot – an advance designed to move its clients closer to a touchless claims experience.
Gigaforce is a California-based insurtech focused on a SaaS-based claims platform that’s enhanced with blockchain.
Gigabot’s automation features include automated file redaction, file indexing, and subrogation scoring.
Gigaforce’s platform combines artificial intelligence (AI)-driven predictive models with specialized expertise. Its customized services are designed to expedite subrogation, recovery and salvage processing for insurance ecosystems including insurers, law firms and third-party adjusters.
Reliance Global Group, an insurtech that combines advanced technologies with the traditional insurance agency model, is nearly national.
The New Jersey-based company said it is now licensed to sell policies in 49 states. Additionally, it has expanded its network to include more than 30 insurance carriers nationally.
“We are making progress on our strategy to expand our nationwide footprint and are now licensed in 49 states,” Ezra Beyman, Reliance chairman and CEO, said in prepared remarks. “Despite the current economic challenges and inflationary environment, we believe we are well positioned for growth as consumers increasingly look for ways to save money.”
The company plans to grow through organic expansion and the acquisition of “well managed, undervalued and cash flow positive insurance agencies.”
