Bold Penguin, a commercial insurance tech provider headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, today announced that it has secured $32 million in a series B funding round, bringing its total raised to over $50 million. Growth equity firms Hudson Structured Capital Management, Lightstone, Guggenheim Insurance, and Lockton participated, along with existing investors and individuals from Stone Point Capital.
CEO Ilya Bodner said the capital will accelerate research and development by way of growing Bold Penguin’s employee roster, which doubled in the past year. He said it will also lay runway for the expansion of the firm’s Excess and Surplus (E&S) lines, or the specialty markets that insure high-risk segments standard insurance carriers won’t cover.
“The commercial insurance space is a fantastic area of insurance that welcomes an upgrade,” said Bodner, who founded Bold Penguin in 2016 with a team hailing from Allstate, Nationwide, and Progressive, as well as regional carriers and mid-sized insurance agencies. “Having support from not only the industry but also the investment community to help fix the problems from within is very exciting in this next chapter of our company.”
Bold Penguin’s platform delivers quotes to businesses, agents, and carriers through an online exchange, powered by a recommendation engine that matches partners with opportunities and a customer toolkit that collects risk info to generate analyses. The company’s API integrates with carriers’ systems, enabling them to create custom interfaces that connect directly to agents and brokers. As for agents, they’re able to create portals to receive prospects based on the types of businesses they’re targeting.
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Bold Penguin counts Berkshire Hathaway’s BiBerk, Motorists Insurance, State Auto Insurance, Markel, Nationwide, Coverwallet, Liberty Mutual, Progressive, BizInsure, Hiscox, CNA, SMB Insurance, Hills & Hamilton, Homesite, and Attune among its long list of clients, and it says its tech has helped over 950,000 small to midsize businesses get a commercial quote to date. In May, it worked with Progressive to build the insurer’s BusinessQuote Explorer, an online quoting solution for small business owners. And Bold Penguin just this month made its agent-facing Agent Terminal product — which lets agencies employ rules-based tools to write commercial insurance — broadly available in all 50 U.S. states.
The average customer can expect triaging, quoting, and binding in hours or even minutes versus the weeks taken by traditional platforms, according to Bold Penguin CTO and cofounder Ben Clarke.
“We’re thrilled to partner with our investors as we build out the next generation of commercial insurance products and features,” said Clarke. “Building a technology company from the ground right here in Columbus, Ohio has been great for us and the region.”
