A startup managing general agency designed to give underserved populations affordable access to auto insurance has raised seed funding to help it launch an initial product.

Sigo pulled in $1.5 million in financing from Amicle Capital, Bonded Capital Ventures, Demeter Capital, Financial Solutions Lab, Park City Angels, and gANGELS. Plans call for using to money to fuel the launch of an auto insurance product that removes biased rate factors from day one of the underwriting process.

Sigo is focused on serving immigrant and Latin American (Latinx) communities. Specifically, it provides affordable access via its direct-to-consumer platform that is tech-enabled, bilingual, and mobile-first.

“Traditional auto insurance companies favor a specific type of customer—affluent, suburban drivers who have consistent coverage and can afford increased coverage limits. But this largely excludes a demographic that’s made up more than half of America’s growth in the last decade— the Latinx population,” Néstor Hugo Solari, Cofounder and CEO of Sigo, said in prepared remarks. “Customers are left penalized for having limited credit, education, or insurance history, factors that have zero impact on how you drive.”

Solari and Júlio Erdos founded Sigo in 2019. Since then, the company said, it has written hundreds of thousands of dollars in premiums through its agency business and maintained a customer retention rate of more than 80 percent in Texas and California, the two states where customers can currently access Sigo’s natively bilingual platform.

Sigo plans to launch its own insurance product in Texas that ends the use of “discriminatory metrics” and instead uses tools such as telematics – by way of what the company said is the U.S.’s first Spanish-language safe driving app.

As well, the company said it is hiring, seeking to fill Director- and Manager-level positions across marketing and customer success.

Sigo’s advisory board members, who bring decades of leadership experience across finance and insurance, have also played an integral role in the company’s growth, according to the company. They include Karl Gouverneur, former CTO of Northwestern Mutual and Safeco Insurance, Bob Sargent, specialty lines insurance founder, advisor, and investor, and Bill Goddard, an insurance veteran and investor at Electromagnetic Advisors.

Source: Sigo