Commercial insurance companies are charging wildly different prices for coverage, and the driver of those prices is a lack of data transparency, according to Ashwin Agarwal, CEO and co-founder at Advocate Technologies.
This is actually a major
Advocate wants to be that company.
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How did you come into your leadership position?
In 2018, I attended WSIA, a wholesale insurance broker conference in San Diego with thousands of brokers, carriers, and reinsurers under one roof. For three days I waited to hear more discussion about the customer. Nobody did. It was all high level. That was the moment the market became clear to me: All problems in commercial insurance start from a lack of transparency and this results in no product reference points.
With no concrete data points, the industry practitioners have no way to discuss what is best for the customer.
I'd spent a decade in institutional finance before that, evaluating insurance and technology investments at a private equity fund, with more deal flow and carrier access than almost anyone in the market and I still couldn't tell you with confidence what a fair price for commercial property insurance looked like for a given business. Neither could any of the biggest insurers. In 2020, I left to build the benchmark layer the market was missing.
What advice would you give to other insurtech leaders, or to yourself five years ago?
Our industry is not about optimizing workflow. So many tech companies have staked their future on a better way to submit quotes, a better processing option and that is it. Workflow solutions are an optimization for an industry that has much deeper problems. Dream bigger. We have so much more to fix than streamlining submissions.
Every valuable problem within insurance is about data. This is the most data intensive business in the world but it has limited quality data sources. Once we unleash our data, we can join our cousins in the financial equity and bond markets with rapid innovation like the industry has never experienced.
My advice to other insurtech leaders: there are ways to increase the size of our market in the next 20 years. We all know the world is insured to 20% or less of the total value that could benefit from risk transfer. The path to making this happen is data-driven transparency — when the customer understands what they are buying, they buy more of it.
How do you see AI changing insurance over the next five years?
AI is the mechanism that finally makes benchmarking commercial insurance possible at scale. There are millions of commercial insurance transactions closed every year, each treated as bespoke, which is why no one has built a real pricing reference for this market before.
Over the next five years, AI will do the work of reading unstructured policies, standardizing them and turning hundreds of millions of individual transactions into an actual market signal, similar to what Kelley Blue Book did for used cars or what Bloomberg did for equities.
Underwriting judgment doesn't disappear; the best advisors become more valuable, not less, because buyers will finally be able to distinguish real expertise from mere access to information others don't have.
What is the biggest opportunity for insurtechs over the next six months?
Commercial insurance is one of the world's largest risk-pricing markets, and it remains an asset class without a transparent data layer. Across comparable commercial properties, buyers purchasing comparable coverage on comparable assets can pay prices that differ by a large amount, and that gap is a direct function of opacity, not risk.
The opportunity for insurtechs right now is to build the benchmark layer this market has never had: real transaction records that let buyers know whether they're paying for risk or paying for the fact that nobody else can see the spread. Whoever builds that trusted, transparent pricing layer first sets the terms for the entire industry.
What is the biggest mistake insurtechs make these days?
Dreaming too small. A better way to process claims, a better way to submit quotes, a better way to offer small-business insurance. These are the same, incremental, ideas from the last two decades of insurtech innovation. They don't build $10 billion outcomes. To build a $10 billion outcome you have to expand the size of the market, not build a better mousetrap to extract value from the same premium dollar.
Any meaning behind the company's name?
The name comes from the industry term and profession of claims advocate. A claims advocate helps the insured to get their claim covered by the insurer. It is the moment when the insurance product is supposed to do its job: give you money so you can move on with your life after a disaster.
If done correctly, it can be the difference between the insured recovering prosperously versus not. At Advocate, we want to provide that same level of help through transparency: see up front coverage quality and pricing, instead of waiting till disaster strikes to see if what you bought is actually what you need.
What is your primary line of business?:
Commercial insurance benchmarking and risk-management technology for lenders, asset managers, brokers and commercial real estate owners.
What's the origin story of the company?
Advocate began after I was evaluating insurance and technology investments at a private equity fund, walked away from half a decade of sitting on insurance company boards, meeting every important executive and deploying hundreds of millions of dollars in investments.
The company is headquartered in New York City.
When was it founded?
2020
What pain points is the technology trying to solve?
Commercial insurance pricing is effectively invisible. Across comparable properties with comparable coverage, buyers can pay prices that differ by over 100%, a gap driven not by risk but by information asymmetry: whether the number in front of you reflects the true market, the carrier's appetite, or your broker's leverage.
Buyers, lenders, and asset managers have no reliable reference point, only a quote delivered through an intermediary in a market where comparable pricing stays hidden. Advocate's platform reads and standardizes real transaction data across policies to give the market the benchmark layer it has never had, so buyers can tell whether they're paying for risk or paying for opacity.
What funding rounds has the company had?
$18 million in seed funding, announced in August, from Vestigo Ventures, Brewer Lane, MetaProp and select family offices.
What's ahead?
Having just emerged from stealth, Advocate is focused on scaling the data network. The transaction data from the policy-servicing network is already being used by insurance brokers in proposal generation, renewal management and growth into new markets. As more brokers, lenders, risk managers and property owners use the platform, the underlying dataset, currently representing $7.3 billion in premiums and 70,000 policies, will expand, sharpening pricing and coverage insights across the market.
