XILO, a San Diego-based InsurTech, announced at the end of 2020 that it has raised just over $2 million in seed financing to fuel development of an SaaS platform for insurance agents. In an indirect way, it has a competitive eye on the much larger Lemonade.

XILO describes its technology as helping insurance agencies “compete against the Lemonades” of the world by giving them “Lemonade-like insurance quoting experiences for their customers.”

Digital insurer Lemonade touts its artificial intelligence bot as a vital tool that helps craft insurance policies in about 90 seconds, or pay a claim in approximately 3 minutes. The company held a successful IPO in July and the company has begun expanding internationally.

XILO, of course, is a much younger company, having launched only in 2019. Still, XILO claims to have already made progress in the marketplace, reporting more than 100 agencies as customers for its platform. The product integrates a variety of insurance raters like EZLynx and TurboRater, both of which XILO said insurance agencies rely on.

XILO employs 10 people right now, though plans call for more then doubling that by the end of 2021.

More details about the company are below, in excerpts from an email Q&A between Carrier Management Editor Mark Hollmer and XILO co-founder and CEO Jon Corrin.

Q: You explain your company as enabling agents to do what Lemonade does. How, precisely?

Corrin: Companies like Lemonade are providing an exceptional user experience to insurance shoppers by providing a great insurance application for them to go through and automating the quoting process so customers can see instant quotes. We’re taking those same elements and giving them to agents. Although quote generation is still on our product roadmap, we’re providing customizable digital insurance applications agents can send to their customers (something that emulates a Lemonade-like experience) and we’re automating data entry into the agents’ existing systems so they can quote faster. The next step is to automatically bring the quote back to the customer for the agent.

Q: Are you seeking to compete with Lemonade?

Corrin: Not directly. But we’re building technology for their competitors, the independent insurance agents.

Q: Is Lemonade a good point of reference to have for your business model?

Corrin: We’re more SaaS for insurance agencies. Our business model would be more similar to Salesforce or/and AMS in the insurance space.

Q: What kind of agents are your target customers?

Corrin: We focus on agents who are looking to build their personal lines or small commercial lines books of business – typically anywhere from 1 – 50 in size.

Q: How big do you want to get?

Corrin: We’re hoping to help over 9K agencies over the next 5 years.

Q: Do you want to remain standalone or be acquired?

Corrin: We want to remain standalone so we can focus on making the product great for agencies.