Herald — Enabling Consumer Grade Commercial Insurance

Today Herald announced that they’ve raised $8M to build digital infrastructure for commercial insurance. Earlier this year we were fortunate to lead Herald’s pre-seed round and in 5 short months Herald closed a seed round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners.

We wanted to share a bit about why Afore invested in Herald.

These days most consumers buy insurance online — auto, home, life — in a pretty simple way with a few taps on their phone or computer. The consumer experience looks something like this.

Consumers answer a few simple questions, then they get a quote, after which they buy. No one truly enjoys buying insurance but the experience is fairly smooth, efficient, and fast.

But for small businesses, actually, any business, buying insurance is quite a different experience. It’s actually a nightmare. Most of it is not online, and the process involves paper, fax, phone, or pdf. The experience looks something like this.

And this is just for one type of insurance — workers compensation. Businesses have to buy a whole lot more — general liability, business property, commercial auto, cyber- to name just a few. A broker then takes all the detailed business information and painstakingly enters them into each insurance carrier’s website one at a time in order to receive a quote. Brokers often maintain a long list of user IDs and passwords to each carrier’s website :)

This painfully manual process limits the number of carriers a business can get quotes from, creates many back-and-forth interactions between the carrier-broker-business owner, and results in delayed quotes and delayed coverage.

Wouldn’t it be great if the process of buying commercial insurance was consumer-grade? For that to happen a digital transformation is needed in the commercial insurance industry, which is estimated to be more than $300 Billion in the US alone. The solution is a simple, unified, developer-friendly API that connects carriers to broker systems and insuretch developers. That is what HeraldAPI is building.

Here’s to consumer-grade commercial insurance!