Meet the insurtech: Joshu

Among the insurtech veterans breaking off from their earlier stops to start their own endeavors is Roy Mill, co-founder and CEO of Joshu.

Founded in late January of 2020, Joshu’s offers insurance carriers and managing general agents a full suite of digital tools to bring their commercial insurance business online. The platform includes key distribution and underwriting automation components including application forms, rating rules, quote and policy document generators, online store administration, reporting and integration functionality. Mill tells Digital Insurance he and co-founder Shimi Bornstein got their start at At-Bay, a cyber insurance insurtech.

"We saw how manual is the process of buying and selling business insurance. We also faced some of the challenges of building web applications that sell insurance online," he says. "When we realized that the insurers that had the deepest experience in insurance did not have great options to migrate online we realized that we needed to build Joshu.”

With most commercial insurance companies still handing transactions manually, over e-mail or with PDF attachments, Joshu sees an opportunity to add efficiency that provides a better user experience across the commercial insurance ecosystem. Insurance professionals can set up their products on their own terms, without requiring custom software development cycles.

[More in our Meet the Insurtech series]

When asked what makes Joshu stand out from competition, Mill says the company is "leveraging assets that the insurance professional already has: the Excel rater, the quote and policy forms Word docs. Combined with state-of-the-art user interfaces for brokers and insureds, we are able to set up slick online distribution quickly. We’re helping our clients leverage API integrations to ingest data—enriching application answers with the carrier’s data providers—or to integrate their insurance product on Joshu with other platforms.”

The company recenty announced a $3.7 million seed round led by Blumberg Capital with participation from Engineering Capital, Correlation Ventures, Innovation Endeavors and Sure Ventures.

“The insurance industry is ripe with numerous opportunities for digital transformation to better serve a broader customer segment.” Bruce Taragin, managing director, Blumberg Capital, said in a statement. “Joshu operates as a true partner with commercial insurance companies to offer a full suite of digital products and capabilities that insurance professionals need to personalize and optimize the user experience for their customers.”

Joshu’s goal is to “help insurers reimagine the way insurance products are developed in the digital age," Mill concludes. "We want to help brokers and carriers leave much of the operations side of the business to machines and focus the organization’s attention to what they’re best at: providing world class risk solutions.”