Gaya, an insurance data entry startup founded in 2021 that gained more financing in March and June this year, arrived at its current product after pivoting from two previous ideas.
The company's co-founders Carl Ziadé, CEO, and Jean-Pierre Vertil, chief technology officer, started out with a car-sharing service they describe as being like Airbnb for cars, then shifted to making a platform for insurance agents to cross-sell auto refinancing. Ziadé and Vertil met while earning master's degrees at Stanford University's business school in 2020. They also have engineering and consulting experience.
While working on the auto refinancing idea, they found that insurance agents and brokers struggle with filling carrier portals.
"The details include 200 fields sometimes, because you have the household members' details, the co-applicant details and their cars' details," Ziadé said. "It's like each one of them had 20 fields."
From building a system that could extract information submitted to insurers and use it to apply for an auto loan, Ziadé and Vertil learned to "scrape" the necessary data. Although scraping has a negative connotation, they acknowledged, that's really what needs to be done for users to get understanding from the data. Asked by insurers to send this data through an API, Gaya responded that it could do that. To accomplish this, Gaya ended up leveraging that scraping of data for agents, brokers and consumers to be able to auto-fill information on carriers' websites.
To develop this function as a product, Gaya took part in programs from
BrokerTech invested $50,000 in Gaya in March. Endeavor Miami, a non-profit supporting entrepreneurs, chose Gaya as one of its EndeavorLAB Cohort of Black Founders in June. The startup will continue funding efforts with a seed round in 2025 and a small bridge round to precede that, according to Ziadé.
This story was updated to clarify the nature of BrokerTech Ventures and Miami Endeavor's backing or support of Gaya.
