The new funding will be used to accelerate product development particularly complex cyber risks
The new decade has started off on an optimistic note for Corvus Insurance. The Boston-based insurtech announced that it has secured approximately $32 million in Series B venture funding. This is in addition to the $10 million in funding the company received in 2018. According to the insurtech, the funding lwill be used to grow the start-up’s existing product lines as well as to accelerate the development of “new technologies and tools to improve risk management” mainly for companies dealing with larger and more complex cyber risk.
“Commercial insurance has failed both brokers and policyholders when it comes to cyber risk, and we are obsessed with changing that outcome. We see a future where brokers act as educated advisors on cyber risk, armed with better options for risk assessment, coverage and risk management for their clients. Empowering brokers to provide this level of service to clients of all sizes, large and small, is how we at Corvus will make the world safer. We are so pleased to have the support of investors who share in this vision.”
The company’s latest funding round was led by San Francisco-based Telstra Ventures, with participation from Obvious Ventures, as well as pre-existing Corvus investors, .406 Ventures, Bain Capital Ventures and Hudson Structured Capital Management. Marcus Bartram, a General Partner with Telstra Ventures, has joined Corvus’s Board of Directors.
Corvus Insurance officially launched in 2017
Corvus Insurance officially began in Boston’s Seaport District back in 2017 as a broker-friendly InsurTech MGA, offering Smart Commercial Insurance™. The name Corvus in Latin means “raven” with corvid denoting “…a family (Corvidae) of stout-billed passerine birds including the crows, jays, magpies, and the raven.” The company has embraced these terms even naming its digital platform for commercial insurance as the “Crowbar.”
Spring ahead to 2020 and Corvus has now grown its company into an AI-Driven Smart Commercial company with a growing flock of employees and offices across the country, including establishing offices in Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Dallas.
In 2018, Phil Edmundson founded Corvus after selling Boston-based insurance broker, William Gallagher Associates (WGA) to NYSE-traded, Arthur J. Gallagher in 2015. In commenting on his decision to re-enter the insurance space with an insurtech start-up with Agency Checklists, he said,”
After selling my insurance brokerage businesses in the US and Europe by 2015, I dug into what we now call InsurTech. I visited with over 100 start-ups and invested in many early-stage InsurTechs like CoverWallet and Verifly. By the end of 2016, I became convinced that great technology was not getting to middle market commercial customers. Generally, that is the opportunity Corvus seeks to address. We have built a great data platform called the CrowBar™ where we turn previously ignored data into risk scores that predict and prevent commercial insurance claims.”
In a follow-up question on what he thinks the most important takeaway is from the creation of Corvus Insurance, he added, “Insurtech requires not just great market insights, and great technologists, but also experienced insurance execs in order to succeed.”
