A Vancouver insurtech company that’s developed an online marketplace aimed at offering insurance products is getting a lot more than it bargained for.
Apollo Insurance Solutions Ltd. (TSX-V:APLO) announced Thursday (January 7) the close of a $13.5-million Series A financing round — nearly $10 million more than the $4 million it was initially targeting.
This comes after the company launched its online marketplace in spring 2019, shortly after closing a $1-million angel funding round.
Insurance brokers use Apollo’s platform to get quotes and pay for products instantly, while the company is also offering monthly subscription services to small businesses.
“Usually that process would take up to six weeks for that broker to shuttle emails back and forth, fill out a whole bunch of paperwork,” CEO Jeff McCann, who previously worked as an insurance broker, told BIV in 2019.
The company said in a release that thousands of different types of businesses and individuals have been able to purchase insurance without any human interaction, adding it would use the fresh capital to expand insurance offerings for both those groups.
“They’re (insurance) a very old-school, bureaucratic industry,” McCann said in 2019.
“You have this massive inefficiency and really at the end of the day that inefficiency gets passed down to the end consumer.”
The financing round was led by Toronto-based Gravitas Securities Inc. with participation from Trisura Group Ltd. (TSX: TSU) —also out of Toronto — and U.S. insurance giant Liberty Mutual Insurance Co.
