As a board member at an insurance brokerage firm, Matt Miller says he saw a number of inefficiencies in the commercial insurance sector that led him to start the digital brokerage Embroker in April 2015.
Embroker provides coverage packages for lawyers, startups and private companies and boasts 20,000 users, Miller claims. Businesses can apply for insurance online and manage policies in a cloud-based portal, according to the website. Embroker partners with Munich Re, Everest Re and other reinsurance companies to back its products. It announced $100 million in new funding earlier this year.
“I think I had an interesting vantage point, being an investor in both insurance companies and software companies,” said Miller. “And I think that was a relatively rare juxtaposition of spending time in both worlds. Spending a bunch of time in insurance, it was clear that there was an incredible opportunity to use technology and build better systems that would make the process better, easier and more efficient. But, no one really had done it.”
He says that commercial insurance companies have traditionally focused on smaller customer segments -- such as small businesses with only two or three employees -- while Embroker strives to cover a wider range of “growing” companies.
“I thought there was the most whitespace [in commercial lines], relative to personal lines where there has already been further progress in terms of creating digital insurance,” said Miller. “I also think that because the buyers tend to be more sophisticated business will have a CFO or CEO or somebody whose job it is to actually purchase insurance and to make risk decisions, that you can actually build products that have a greater level of differentiation and explain them in a way that the buyers I think can understand.”
The use of machine learning and artificial intelligence allows Embroker customers to have faster and cheaper access to the insurance that best suits their needs, Miller says. In October 2020, Embroker launched Embroker Access, which allowed outside brokers to take advantage of Embroker’s products, quoting and cloud-based policy management. They used a beta launch before Embroker Access was wholly available to ensure that the product was the correct quality level.
Embroker plans to use its new funding to expand the company into a full-stack insurtech company, although Miller says that they will likely continue working with reinsurance companies even in the future. Embroker hopes to build its own insurance carrier with the funding in hopes of controlling the whole value chain in the hopes of rebuilding the commercial insurance from the ground up. Embroker’s end goal is to create “a radically more simple experience businesses,” said Miller.
“I think it'll also allow us to continue to build products that are potentially even more innovative than those that we've done before, because by actually being able to control everything, I think it's easier to try things that haven't been tried before," he says. “It can be challenging when you're relying on partners every time that you want to do something entirely new.”
