Ledger Investing raises $75 million in Series B led by WestCap
Today, we’re thrilled to share that Ledger Investing has raised $75M in a Series B funding round, led by WestCap with participation from Teachers’ Venture Growth, Intact Ventures, and our previous investors, SignalFire, MassMutual Ventures, Allegis Capital and Accel. This new capital will fuel our rapid growth, allowing us to expand our insurance capital marketplace, data infrastructure offerings, and asset management services. We will hire an additional 200 people to further our mission of transforming the financing structure of the entire insurance industry by bringing unprecedented transparency, standardization, and automation to the space.
Ledger Investing offers a marketplace connecting insurance risk with capital.
Since completing Y Combinator’s accelerator program in the winter of 2017, Ledger Investing has successfully introduced insurance securitization into the U.S. casualty market by providing sophisticated data analytics and repeatable transaction structures to the entire ecosystem, creating efficiencies for insurers and uncorrelated returns for institutional investors. We’ve placed over $400 million in premium into the capital markets and are on track to exceed $1 billion by the end of the year. Our live premium tracker is publicly available.
Managing General Agents (MGAs) and insurance carriers have leveraged our marketplace for multi-year underwriting capacity and access to alternative capital, unlocking incremental value. We have enabled institutional investors to achieve attractive and diversifying risk-adjusted returns through our ILS fund, Nanorock, and from direct investments in brokered securitizations.
As Ledger Investing grows, our marketplace will serve virtually all types of insurance risks and capital, encompassing traditional reinsurers, institutional investors, wealth managers, and accredited retail investors. Our unified data pipeline, Ledger Connect, will power the marketplace with real-time actionable insights and rich, powerful analytics for risk originators as well as investors, establishing the new market standard.
Why does insurance securitization matter?
Capital-burdened insurance companies have long remained amongst the lowest-ranked service providers in the economy, but they do not have to be doomed to this fate. Instead, many can emulate technology-like capital efficiency with the proper asset-light capital structure. Increasingly, the insurance value chain will create value from its ability to describe risks and offer a better experience to insurance buyers. Ledger Investing addresses the biggest challenges that have historically hampered innovation in the insurance and capital markets:
- Institutional investors have long been attracted to casualty insurance, but have been handicapped by the opacity of risk, unreliable nature of data, and convoluted transaction structures.
- Insurance capital is inefficient. Every other financial sector has successfully used securitization to access large pools of capital and eliminate unnecessary frictional costs, making consumer credit, mortgages, real estate, and other streams of cash flows into investable asset classes. Insurance is next.
- Insurance data is analog, disparate, fragmented, and bespoke. The industry is starved for free-flowing, standardized, and real-time data.
Help us build the future of insurance!
Following the regulatory prompted “Open Banking” shift, a whole host of FinTech startups — including Plaid, Bond, and most recently Stripe — have pushed the envelope on “Open Finance”. Acting as aggregators, these companies are democratizing financial data on mortgages, savings, pensions, and credit, all facilitated by robust and developer-friendly API architecture. This type of cross-platform integration has enabled businesses to embed financial products, benefiting customers — consumers, small-to-medium enterprises, and corporations alike — by letting them regain control of data sharing, access more applications, and consequently, make more informed decisions. In a similar vein, Ledger Investing is striving to build the next generation of “Open Insurance” systems that support dynamic data-flow between risk originators and the capital markets via Ledger Connect, which will replace the archaic pipes that exist today.
Ledger Investing is hiring 200 extraordinary people to revolutionize insurance. No industry veteran background is required to apply. We are actively seeking innovative software engineers, data scientists, and sales professionals to join our team! Check out our job openings at www.ledgerinvesting.com/careers.
Our momentum would not have been possible without the dedication and efforts of our incredible team, which spans across the country in New York, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. We extend our gratitude to everyone who has helped us reach this far in our journey.
About Ledger Investing
Ledger Investing, Inc. is an insurance tech startup financed by leading VCs and strategic insurance industry investors. Ledger ILS Managers, LLC, is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Ledger Investing, Inc. and an investment advisor registered with the SEC. Ledger Capital Markets, LLC is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Ledger Investing, Inc. and a securities broker/dealer registered with the SEC and a member of FINRA and SIPC.
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About WestCap
WestCap is a strategic investor and operator in growth equity that partners with visionary leaders to build generational companies.
Visit www.WestCap.com.
