Ascend Raises $30M Series A, Secures $250M Loan Commitment to Boost Modern Insurance Payment Offerings

NEW YORK, January 27, 2022 /PRNewswire/ — Risethe leading modern insurance payments platform, today announced that it has raised a $30 million Series A in equity, bringing total funds raised to $39M accompanied by a $250 million loan commitment to fund insurance premium loans through its platform facilitated by Hudson Structured Capital Management Ltd. – doing business in re/insurance as HSCM Bermuda – an investment advisor specializing in re/insurance, insurtech and transportation investments.

The Series A funding was led by Index Ventures with the participation of new investors such as Distributed Enterprises and its anchor sponsor partner NFP, the tenth largest property and casualty insurance broker in the world, HSCM Bermuda, XYZ Companiesand a series of strategic angel investors, including Garret Koehn (investor at The Batchery and chairman of CRC insurance); Courtney Leimkulher (founding partner of Springbank Collective and former Chief Financial Officer of Marsh); Mischief, (a venture capital fund led by the CEO of a payment infrastructure company Plaid); Nilam Ganenthiran (former president of Instacart); Nathaniel Manning (co-founder of Kettle Insurance); and other fintech operators, including Misha Esipov (CEO and founder of Nova Credit), Marc Bhargava (co-founder of Tagomi and currently at Coinbase); Mahdi Raza (Partner at Exponent capital), and Charley Ma (Managing Director at Alloy). Also in attendance were existing investors First Round Capital, Suse Venturesand FirstMark Capital.

Ascend’s payment APIs and no-code products automate end-to-end insurance payments – from online point of sale with buy now, pay later financing to distributing insurance commissions and liabilities. ‘operator. This enables insurance brokers, MGAs and insurers to sell more policies by eliminating labor-intensive processes while providing customers with the excellent online payment and funding experience they crave. wait.

“We have seen a huge increase in demand over the past six months since our launch. Our payment software significantly reduces buying friction for customers purchasing insurance while simultaneously reducing or eliminating business processes traditionally at labor-intensive for brokers, AGs and carriers,” says Praveen Chekuri, co-CEO and co-founder of Ascend. “With this new funding, we can meet this demand and help more customers use Ascend’s integrated payments and the buy-it-now-pay-later offer. We are delighted to have the support and backing funding from these investors to help insurance distributors and insurers sell their products more effectively and build the future of insurance infrastructure,” says Chekuri.

The funding will be used to hire dozens of new team members – 50% of Ascend employees are from groups typically underrepresented in tech. The team will play a critical role in expanding the product’s rapid growth and improving feature sets, including user experience for no-code clients, integrations with the industry’s dominant agency management systems. industry and ensuring that the full suite of product features is easily accessible in the APIs so that customers can use the product to its full potential. The lending capacity will be used to streamline business and personal lines of insurance lending, helping to ease friction with modern financing infrastructure and growing demand for high-quality customer experiences.

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“Buying commercial insurance is surprisingly complicated – I’ve seen this problem first hand through our investments in companies like cover walletsurety, coalition and Newfront Insurance,” said Mark GoldbergPartner at Index Ventures. “Building a modern payments experience that is more like Shopify and less like producing tax forms is the biggest opportunity in the insurance market today. There is an immediate need for the type of end-to-end payment product verticalized, integrated end-to-end that spans brokers, MGAs, and carriers,” says Goldberg. “Ascend will be redefining how insurance is bought and sold for the next decade and we’re excited to see this team execute and grow. grow so quickly.”

Today, Ascend operates nationwide in all 50 states and works with industry-leading customers including Vouch, Cowbell, Newfront, Increase insuranceNFP, LuckyTruck, Risk of theft, Insurance Portal, and Riskwell. Ascend customers have seen increased conversion of policy purchases due to reduced friction when offered the option of flexible monthly point-of-sale payments. In some cases, customer adoption of financing has more than doubled, from less than 40% (pre-Ascend) to 80% (post-Ascend). Additionally, millions of dollars worth of policies have been traded through Ascend, with the average value of each being nearly $10,00061% of transactions are premium finance loans, the remaining 39% are fully paid policies, while 33% of cases created turn into a transaction and 30% of all conversions happen the same day the policy is created. checkout.

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Ascend is the modern insurance payments platform that provides automated financing, collections and accounts payable all-in-one. Founded by two insurtech entrepreneurs Andrew Wynn and Praveen Chekuri, Ascend helps distributors sell more by eliminating costly, labor-intensive processes while providing customers with the exceptional online payment and financing experience they expect. To learn more, please visit LinkedIn, Twitter or consult https://useascend.com/.

Contact:Kathy Osborne[email protected]

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