BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Herald, a digital infrastructure that connects software developers to commercial insurance carriers through a single API, announced today that it has raised $8 million in new funding. The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from Underscore and Afore Capital, along with angel investors Garrett Koehn (President of brokerage, CRC Group), Rotem Iram (Founder and CEO, At-Bay), and Charley Ma (General Manager, Alloy) among others. With this new funding, Herald will expand its product and engineering teams, scale support for additional lines of business, and accelerate integrations with its carrier partners.
“Insurance is a complex, fragmented, and highly-regulated financial service. We’ve seen company after company struggle to connect their technology to the insurance ecosystem on their own,” said Matthew Antoszyk, Founder and CEO of Herald. “Buying insurance is a major frustration for millions of small business owners. Our infrastructure powers the innovative insurance carriers and distributors that are solving this problem today.”
Historically, commercial insurance brokers get quotes through a time-consuming and manual process of emailing applications to underwriters at hundreds of insurance carriers. Herald leverages technology that replaces this manual process with integrations to carriers’ automatic quoting algorithms via API. Herald’s technology replaces the need for customers to build and maintain their own integrations with multiple insurance carriers. BindHQ, a provider of agency management system (AMS) software, used Herald’s API to launch an automatic multi-carrier quoting solution that saves its brokers over 30 minutes of manual effort per applicant.
“Herald has greatly accelerated our ability to launch carrier integrations and lowered the ongoing maintenance burden on our software development team,” said Cristian Joe, CEO of BindHQ. “With Herald, what used to take our team months to build now only takes a couple of hours. My team now spends less time on integrations and more time focusing on building the best AMS experience for our brokers.”
Today, software developers use Herald’s API to get quotes from multiple carriers across multiple lines of business, including Workers’ Compensation, Business Owners Policy (BOP), and General Liability. Herald has partnered with national and regional carriers along with insurtechs, including Markel, CNA, At-Bay, Cowbell, Corvus, Atlantic Casualty, Century Surety, Coterie, and AmTrust, among others.
“Insurance is a trillion dollar part of the financial services industry that is at the very beginning of its digital transformation,” said Yoni Cheifetz, partner at Lightspeed Ventures. “By building best-in-class tools for software developers, Herald will continue to unlock the necessary innovation on both the carrier and distribution side of the market to move commercial insurance online. Herald is already on a strong trajectory, with industry-leading technology and a founding team with deep insurtech experience.”
About Herald:
Herald builds digital infrastructure for commercial insurance. Developers who use Herald can get quotes from multiple commercial insurance carriers through a single API. For more information, visit heraldapi.com.