Embroker, a digital platform focused on business insurance, aims to become a full-stack carrier – an expansion of its strategy enabled by $100 million in new venture capital financing.

The money infusion will help fulfill a broader rethinking of how business coverage is marketed, sold and purchased, according to Embroker CEO Matt Miller.

“For Embroker to truly forge a new approach to business insurance, we need to reimagine and rebuild every part of the process,” Miller said in prepared remarks. “Even as some of the surface-level elements of insurance have become increasingly customized and digitized, the underlying legacy systems and antiquated processes endemic to this industry are needlessly complex and require a substantial overhaul. This investment round will help us make business insurance a more streamlined and radically simple experience by accelerating our progress in building many of these systems from the ground up.”

FTV Capital led the Series C financing, with additional investment from Hudson Structured Capital Management and Gaingels. Tola Capital, Canaan Partners, Bee Partners, Manulife Capital Ventures, and MassMutual Ventures also contributed follow-on financing.

The new round will also enable further growth of Embroker Access, a part of the company’s platform that allows retail and wholesale brokers to offer Embroker’s digital insurance products to customers. Embroker’s target market: businesses with 10 to 1,000 employees.

In transitioning from a broker to a carrier, Embroker will be following in the footsteps of another California InsurTech, Next Insurance. Next Insurance, which like Embroker debuted in 2016 as a digital insurance agency for small to medium-size businesses, began repositioning itself in 2018 to become a licensed insurance carrier.

San Francisco-based Embroker claims its platform offers streamlined insurance management, allowing businesses to get a unified view of their policies companywide, along with real-time claims tracking and instant certificates of insurance. Customers can buy or renew any type of policy from more than 50 commercial insurance carriers, in areas including Directors and Officers, Employment Practices Liability, Cyber, and Professional Liability.

Customers can go digital but also seek expert guidance from advisers who specialize in specific industries. Embroker’s digital insurance products are instantly underwritten by Embroker’s insurance platform and are fully backed by A+ rated reinsurers including Munich Re and Everest Re, the company notes.

Embroker applies modern data-driven underwriting models designed to assess risk better, and create policies and premiums that protect companies against that risk. The company asserts that this “unique algorithmic-based risk management” helps reduce premiums for businesses by as much as 20 percent.

Embroker said it surpassed $20M in gross written premium for the 2021 first quarter and claims to have achieved more than 100 percent retention.

With the new funding round, Embroker has raised $140 million to date, including $28 million in April 2019.

Source: Embroker