Why We Invested In HoundDog
Reach out to Brett Calhoun, Managing Director & GP at Redbud VC, at brett@redbud.vc to learn about Redbud, and subscribe to our newsletter here.
💡 HoundDog is streamlining insurance compliance so that one-person can compete with a 100-person team. By automating insurance verification and tracking tools they will boost transparency, reduce archaic processes, and decrease costs of compliance.
Investment premise
Managing third-party insurance is a headache for contractors, property managers, trucking companies, and others; but it’s crucial to protect their business. Without verifying vendors’ insurance, significant liability risk falls onto the hiring entity potentially leaving them at risk of significant financial loss.
Most businesses manually collect and verify Certificates of Insurance (COIs) from their vendors - a process which involves multiple failure points. For example, employees must track down COIs from each vendor, verify that the coverage meets their requirements, retain this data, and store the COIs. There are two problems with this approach. First, human error during any of these steps can expose the company to risk with an approximately ~90% accuracy rate.
Second, it takes about 38 minutes per COI verification, which is time employees could spend on higher-value work. With no cost-efficient tools geared toward helping small business contractors, these archaic processes have led to 75% of US businesses being underinsured by 40%+.
The HoundDog team believes that with today’s technology, there’s no excuse for exposures to go unidentified or for tracking insurance to be a full-time job. HoundDog’s simple platform automates the entire verification and tracking process, reducing employees’ manual workload by as much as 75%.
How HoundDog automates insurance tracking
HoundDog works directly with vendors and their insurance agents to collect insurance documents. Then, the software uses machine learning to read and display data in a clean dashboard. When COIs expire, it automatically reverifies them. When the company has personnel changes, the data and process remain steadfast.
HoundDog’s goal is to help business owners and risk managers stop wasting time on manual tracking and outdated systems that expose their company to risk — so they can focus on their business, knowing it’s protected.
The next wave of P&C innovation
Over the next decade, the $777B property and casualty business insurance industry will expand rapidly due to data insights extracted from digitizing operations. The vision behind HoundDog is not to be the best insurance tracking software, but to use this data to identify and insure vendors and subcontractors that are uninsured or underinsured. This is accomplished by 1) providing warm leads to partner brokers and agencies, and 2) ultimately, offering HoundDog insurance products directly to users.
HoundDog’s founders have decades of experience building businesses in a range of industries including business insurance. They are principled Midwest operators who seek to serve customers and build a solid business.
Reach out to Brett Calhoun, Managing Director & GP at Redbud VC, at brett@redbud.vc to learn about Redbud, and subscribe to our newsletter here.
