Please welcome Ranger Insurance, the modern home insurance platform
Meet Ranger Insurance, the latest addition to Lerer Hippeau’s portfolio.
HQ: New York
Founders: Philip Krim, Gabriel Flateman, Greg Garrison
The problem: The $500 billion home insurance market is flawed. Ultra wealthy homeowners may receive hands-on support from their insurance agents, but everyone else just purchases a policy and hopes for the best. That leaves most homes underinsured by an average of $100K, and homeowners at risk. It also undermines agents’ expertise and ability to serve their customers. To date, insurance agents haven’t had the modern tools they need to support their customers fully, and everyone suffers.
Ranger Insurance’s solution: Ranger Insurance reimagines home insurance with a modern digital platform that empowers agents to better serve clients and build their businesses. This approach results in fully protected homes and successful agents, as Ranger aims to elevate the agents in the industry rather than replace them with automated tech. Ranger’s ability to give insurance agents smarter, more streamlined tools, will help them respond more quickly to customers, generate better leads, maximize cross-sell to other products, and personalize client services. When Ranger launches in the fall, the company will offer home insurance, auto insurance, and a home warranty policy.
Origin story: Ranger is co-founded by Philip Krim and Gabriel Flatman, whom we’ve worked with since we invested in their company, Casper, in 2014. Philip and Gabe changed customers’ expectations about the mattress industry, driving both improved efficiency and customer experience, which is what they seek to do with Ranger as well. Greg Garrison rounds out the team. His 15 years in the insurance industry, primarily at AIG, showed him how neglected agents are at legacy insurance companies, and how dangerous underinsurance can be for homeowners. We’re glad to support this latest venture and excited to see all of the ways in which it helps everyone involved in the home insurance process.
Why we’re betting on it: Ranger is fundamentally rethinking the entire home insurance industry and process. For the last 20 years, homeowners have been encouraged to spend as little time thinking about insurance and as little money on it as possible, and products have been commoditized. But Ranger doesn’t view someone’s home as a commodity — it’s so much more than that. Ranger’s value proposition is around making home insurance decisions important again, and adding value for agents (including through financial gain as well as creating a realistic path to agency ownership) in the process.
Our take: We’ve been interested in opportunities to make small business owners and service providers more efficient in their work — while offering a better experience to their end customers. In the case of home insurance, with climate change driving more and more extreme weather events, we believe that the current rate of underinsurance will have an increasingly devastating impact on homeowners — whose homes are often their greatest assets (both in terms of financial value and intangible attachment). Agents are best positioned to advise homeowners on how to protect those assets. Ranger empowers those agents through technology to improve their customers’ experience and ensure all homeowners are informed about how to protect their homes.
Further reading: “Casper king Philip Krim is getting into the insurance business” via TechCrunch
