Ascend has raised a $30 million Series A round while simultaneously gaining a lending commitment of $250 million to finance insurance premium loans via its platform. The lending is being provided 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 Series A round was led by Index Ventures.
New investors include Distributed Ventures and its limited partner NFP, HSCM Bermuda, XYZ Ventures, and a series of strategic angel investors including Garret Koehn, Courtney Leimkulher; Mischief; Nilam Ganenthiran; Nathaniel Manning; Misha Esipov, Marc Bhargava; Mahdi Raza, and Charley Ma. Existing investors also participated including First Round Capital, Susa Ventures, and FirstMark Capital.
Founded by Insurtech entrepreneurs Andrew Wynn and Praveen Chekuri, Ascend aims to be an insurance payments platform that provides automated all-in-one financing, collections, and payables.
Ascend’s payments APIs and no code products are designed to 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.
Chekuri, co-CEO, said they have experienced huge demand in the last 6 months since they have launched:
“Our payment software greatly reduces purchase friction for customers buying insurance while simultaneously reducing or eliminating traditionally labor-intensive operational processes for brokerages, MGAs, and carriers. With this new funding, we can meet that demand and help more customers use Ascend’s embedded payments and buy-now-pay-later offering. We’re excited to have the backing and financial support of these investors to help insurance distributors and carriers sell their products more effectively and build out the future of the insurance infrastructure.”
Mark Goldberg, Partner at Index Ventures, said that buying commercial insurance is very complicated and he has experienced the challenges first hand:
“Building a modern checkout experience that feels more Shopify and less like filing tax forms is the biggest opportunity in the insurance market today. There’s an immediate need for the type of verticalized and embedded end-to-end payments product that spans brokers, MGAs, and carriers. Ascend will redefine how insurance is bought and sold for the coming decade and we’re excited to see this team execute and grow so quickly.”
The funding is expected to be used to hire dozens of new team members. The lending capacity will be used to streamline both commercial and personal lines of insurance loans.
Ascend is currently operating in all 50 states working with industry-leading customers including Vouch, Cowbell, Newfront, Boost Insurance, NFP, LuckyTruck, Rogue Risk, Portal Insurance, and Riskwell. The company reports that millions of dollars of policies have been transacted through its platform with the average value of each being nearly $10,000.