San Francisco-based startup Newfront Insurance has set out to revolutionize the insurance brokerage process for commercial businesses across multiple industries.
In an effort to make the search for commercial insurance a bit less complicated, Newfront’s platform features thousands of digitized insurance applications that can be viewed or changed at any time.
The insurtech startup announced Tuesday that it raised over $100 million in new financing to help further its goal. According to the company, the latest round places its valuation at $500 million.
Newfront offers up multiple lines of coverage to its clients, including cyber liability, worker’s compensation, product liability, general liability and more. Its risk management experts build personalized, industry-specific coverage plans.
The cash infusion will be used to further invest in Newfront’s platform, expand resources for its clients and improve its growth strategy.
“Creating a successful new business is hard in any industry, but in insurance it’s an especially daunting challenge,” Spike Lipkin, the company’s co-founder and CEO, wrote in a blog post.
The idea for the company came about as Lipkin, the former head of finance for a real estate startup, grew increasingly frustrated with its internal processes.
“While happy to take care of something as critical as mitigating existential risk, I was stunned by the archaic and confusing process,” Lipkin wrote. “There was no clear data set to help me understand which carriers to approach, which coverages to seek, or how peer businesses were buying.”
According to Lipkin, that same process repeated each year and only worsened when dealing with claims.
“For too many business owners, dealing with insurance has become an unpleasant, almost unbearable process,” Lipkin continued. “I became obsessed with the idea of modernizing the industry by empowering the people at its core with purpose-built technology.”
Newfront’s co-founder and CTO Gordon Wintrob experienced similar roadblocks when trying to purchase insurance for his previous employer. The two launched Newfront in 2017.
The company’s team of 200 now serves over 5,000 clients across multiple industries including tech, finance, hospitality, manufacturing and more.
“While we’ve learned a great deal over the past three years and made plenty of mistakes along the way, our founding thesis hasn’t changed that the future of our industry combines experts with technology to better serve clients,” Lipkin said.
The latest round was led by Founders Fund and Meritech Capital, among others.
