Sayata, a marketplace for insurance brokers and carriers, added $35 million to its latest funding round. The InsurTech previously raised $17 million five months ago, resulting in a total A round of $52 million.
The additional raise was led by Pitango Growth and Hanaco Ventures, with participation from previous investors Team8 Capital, Vertex Ventures, Elron Ventures and OurCrowd.
Sayata CEO and Founder Asaf Lifshitz said extending its current funding round was a way for the company to expand into new lines of coverage faster.
“There is a lot of market demand for a better way to secure commercial insurance for SMBs (small and midsize businesses),” he said. “Further, our clients have specifically asked for us to add more lines of insurance to the Sayata platform.”
The company currently offers cyber insurance on its platform and will use the funds to speed up the process of adding new business insurance lines. Lifshitz could not disclose which lines are being added, although he said one new line is already in beta and will be announced soon.
Sayata’s proprietary technology automates the process of finding and securing business insurance, allowing brokers to enter information into its software platform, which delivers multiple insurance quotes tailored to the client’s needs.
Once a quote is chosen, brokers complete the process and secure coverage through the platform. The platform itself launched nearly two years ago, with a specific focus on the SMB space.
“Based on what we learned, there weren’t so many viable technology solutions that made it simple for SMB brokers to do their job,” Lifshitz said. “We were a bit stunned at how labor intensive the quote-bind-issue process is for securing commercial coverage for SMBs.”
The challenges Sayata observed with legacy technology in the SMB space have been compounded by today’s hard cyber market, Lifshitz said, which has made it difficult to find coverage in some cases as carrier rethink their appetite for cyber.
“With this change in carrier appetite, it is even harder for brokers to know who to approach,” he said. “Finding any coverage, much less the right coverage, takes a lot of time. For the broker, this lengthy process is hard to justify for a small commercial premium.”
He said in light of this, he’s observed a shift in the InsurTech space away from new coverages toward strategies that aim to improve the insurance industry’s operations through technology.
“We believe that there’s massive value to unlock by improving the insurance business itself,” he said. “We help carriers by bringing brokers to them and, in many cases, solving the need to build out their own technological solutions. Brokers win by migrating to an all-digital system, removing themselves from the more time-consuming tasks of placing risk. Finally, the insured gets more quotes so they can choose the best coverage for their business.”
Sayata is based in Boston, Mass., with employees throughout the U.S. and Israel.