Ascend, a NYC-based modern insurance payments platform, raised $30M in Series A equity funding, bringing the total funding raised to $39M.
The round was led by Index Ventures with participation from new investors such as Distributed Ventures and its anchor limited partner NFP, HSCM Bermuda, XYZ Ventures, and a series of strategic angel investors including:
- Garret Koehn (Investor at The Batchery and the President of CRC Insurance);
- Courtney Leimkulher (Founding Partner at Springbank Collective and former CFO of Marsh);
- Mischief (a venture capital fund led by the CEO of payments infrastructure company Plaid);
- Nilam Ganenthiran (former President of Instacart);
- Nathaniel Manning (Co-Founder of Kettle Insurance);
- Misha Esipov (CEO and Founder at Nova Credit),
- Marc Bhargava (co-founder of Tagomi and currently at Coinbase);
- Mahdi Raza (Partner at Exponent Capital),
- Charley Ma (General Manager at Alloy),
- First Round Capital,
- Susa Ventures, and
- FirstMark Capital.
The company intends to use the funds to hire dozens of new team members, expand its growth and improve feature sets including the user experience for no-code customers, integrations with industry dominant agency management systems, and ensuring the full suite of product features are accessible in APIs so customers can utilize the product to its full potential.
The company also raised a $250M lending commitment to finance insurance premium loans through its platform facilitated by Hudson Structured Capital Management Ltd. – doing its re/insurance business as HSCM Bermuda – an investment adviser that specializes in re/insurance, insurtech, and transportation investments. The lending capacity will be used to streamline both commercial and personal lines of insurance loans.
Founded by two-time insurtech entrepreneurs Andrew Wynn and Praveen Chekuri, Ascend provides an insurance payments platform that provides automated all-in-one financing, collections, and payables. Its payments APIs and no code products automate insurance payments end-to-end — from an online point of sale with buy now, pay later financing to the distribution of commissions and carrier payables.
Today, Ascend is operating nationally in all 50 states working with customers including Vouch, Cowbell, Newfront, Boost Insurance, NFP, LuckyTruck, Rogue Risk, Portal Insurance, and Riskwell.
FinSMEs
27/01/2022