Insurify (www.insurify.com), an AI-powered car insurance comparison platform recently announced that, after several successful pilot programs, it is expanding into life insurance comparison as well as home and renters insurance.
To help drive this expansion, the Cambridge, Mass.-based company also announced that it has raised $23 million in Series A funding, led by MTech Capital and Viola FinTech, with participation from Nationwide, Hearst Ventures, and MassMutual Ventures—and that it has hired the former SVP of Engineering at KAYAK, Gene Shkolnik, as its CTO.
Eight in 10 Americans live paycheck to paycheck, with insurance being one of the top monthly expenses. People are looking for ways to save, yet shopping for car insurance is still a laborious, confusing, and frankly, painful process, Insurify says—especially for the economically disadvantaged and the Millennial and Gen Z generation.
Enter Insurify: a company using machine learning to make buying coverage easy for everyone, and saving customers, the company says, an average of $489 per policy on their car insurance. Now, Insurify is expanding to help people navigate the world of home, renters, and life insurance as well.
Insurify said it has doubled revenue year-over-year consistently since it launched, with 125,000 policies closed worth over $10B of insurance coverage.
The company was co-founded by husband-and-wife Snejina and Giorgos Zacharia (the latter is also the CTO of KAYAK), and Tod Kiryazov, who leads product and growth.
Their mission is to fix the broken insurance distribution system by building the smart virtual insurance agent of the future. Insurify says it delivers value to both the customer and the insurance company by removing marketing and agency costs, protecting personal information, and empowering both large and small insurance companies by providing access to new customers they might not otherwise reach. (One little known fact is that it’s often the lesser-known regional insurers that have the highest customer satisfaction scores.)
Visitors to the site answer a few questions about themselves and their needs, and within two minutes, Insurify says it will provide actual, bindable insurance quotes from numerous top national and regional companies, tailor-fit to client preferences—which they can then purchase on the spot online.
The intuitive user experience and AI-powered recommendation engine walk clients through complex decisions, such as why they may want to go with an auto plan with more liability coverage if they own a home.
“Across different products and markets, price comparison sites have empowered consumers by driving price transparency and significant cost savings. We believe the distribution of auto insurance in the U.S. is at an inflection point as consumers are increasingly purchasing it online, and that Insurify is positioned to be the industry leader that helps buyers find savings. Snejina is a talented leader who has built an outstanding team. MTech Capital is very excited to become a shareholder,” said Kevin McLoughlin, Partner and Co-founder of MTech Capital.
“Founded only 2 years ago, Insurify marks our fourth investment in the insurtech space, which we’re very bullish about,” added Prof. Daniel Tsiddon, Founder and General Partner at Viola Fintech. “We believe the insurance space is still suffering from high inefficiency and low penetration of automation and that Insurify’s solution provides a massive opportunity to make insurance purchasing simple.”
How Insurify says it reinvents the experience
- Data-driven approach to coverage and carrier recommendation: Insurify invented RateRank, proprietary, patented software that analyzes patterns and matches each user’s risk profile with the best and most affordable insurance companies and coverage for their unique profile.
- Price and quality comparison: Although price is one of the most important drivers for switching insurance, people also care about reviews, customer service, and benefits. Insurify says it is the only platform that helps consumers make qualitative and quantitative insurance decisions and recommends the insurers that are the best match for the consumer. The platform has collected over 100,000 reviews from customers.
- Discounts and exclusive prices: Insurify has partnered with insurance companies to offer exclusive prices not available through independent agent channels or direct on carrier’s sites. It has also aggregated 1,861 different types of insurance discounts and makes it easy to understand all possible discounts available on a specific policy, so they get the best possible deal.
- API integrations with insurance companies: Insurify has direct partnerships and API integrations with most of the top 10 carriers in the USA, and many regional carriers, allowing consumers to buy directly from Insurify online.
- Privacy: 5.6 billion robocalls were made in November 2019. The majority of insurance comparison sites currently operate on a lead generation business model and don’t even show quotes, meaning they take personal information you enter to retrieve quotes, and then sell it to others to flood consumers with texts and phone calls. Insurify says it never sells information to third parties, and will never call a client unless explicitly requested.
- Wallet: Manage all of your policies—auto, home, and life—in one secure place. Insurify also saves a client’s personal information, so they never need to enter it twice when looking for new policy options, or to check if a better plan has become available.
“Our mission is to make insurance shopping transparent, and to empower everyone to make insurance decisions on their own without the help of an agent, where incentives are rarely aligned. For the average American, saving a few hundred dollars a year is significant. We are changing people’s lives every day by helping them cut their monthly burden and also helping protect their families and loved ones,” said Snejina Zacharia, Co-Founder and CEO of Insurify.
