Huckleberry, online insurance purchasing and management platform for small businesses, will use its $18 million Series A funding to build out its paperless platform, says CEO Bryan O’Connell.
“Having worked at an insurance carrier, I knew that it was possible to build a platform that eliminates tedious offline paperwork and puts the small business owner first,” shared Bryan O’Connell, CEO of Huckleberry.
The series A funding was led by Tribe Capital, along with investments from Amaranthine, Crosslink Capital, and Uncork Capital. The new investment round allows Huckleberry to expand into verticals including personal care, auto repair, restaurants and more. it provides workers’ compensation, general liability, property and business interruption insurance to small businesses online.
“I'm most excited to build out our product, design and engineering teams. In such an old school industry, there is no shortage of problems to work on. This allows us to tackle more of them," O’Connell adds.
The new investments will also enable the company to scale its operations, including engineering, data science and marketing. O’Connell, shared “there is an abundance of data available on the public internet about these companies that can be used to populate the complex and often confusing insurance application in its entirety. In addition, most business owners don’t care or know about industry classification codes, insurance experience modifiers, or want to deal with all the rules around payroll.”
One of the goals, according to O’Connell for consumers and insurers is to build the best insurance experience for as many types of business as possible. Huckleberry joining both public and proprietary data sources is set to improve data accuracy while increasing the breadth of data “that can be used to assess a company than what is normally available to traditional insurance companies,” he says.
