- Advanced home insurance shopping platform Young Alfred announced it hit 20x sales over the last 18 months and that it raised $10 million
Young Alfred — one of the most advanced home insurance shopping platforms — announced a few milestones recently. Young Alfred hit 20x sales over the last 18 months. And the company also revealed it raised $10 million in funding led by Gradient Ventures (Google’s artificial intelligence focused venture capital fund) with participation from seed round investors Pear Ventures, ERA, and Newfund Capital.
The demand for home insurance experts has been on the rise. And home insurance premiums are expected to hit over $100 billion of annual premium this year and closer to $140 billion by 2015, according to William Blair Research – 2019 Homeowners Acquisition Cost Report: Homeowners Market Presents Big Opportunities.
The premium growth is driven by an increased frequency of catastrophic events. For example, there were 9 separate $10 billion events that hit US homeowners in just the past four years.
Young Alfred co-founders Jason Christiansen and David Stasie launched the company while attending the Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania.
Christiansen and Stasie have experience working at hedge funds and private equity firms. While they were working at those firms, they were surprised by the small amount of data available to consumers during the home insurance purchasing process.
And so they created Young Alfred to empower homeowners with the data to compare and purchase coverage online by highlighting the fine print under each policy form. Young Alfred is a licensed insurance agency in all 50 states and with direct relationships with over 30 insurance carriers.
Young Alfred plans to use the funding to hire engineering, sales, and business development talent along with scaling its marketing efforts to bring the best-in-class home insurance shopping experience to homeowners and partners.
Even though Young Alfred was created for homeowners, other parties are now taking notice.
“We have received a lot of inbound demand from fintechs and large players in the real estate industry looking for a seamless online home insurance shopping solution, which does not currently exist in the market,” said David. “With new resources that Gradient brings to the table, Young Alfred is on track to release a Stripe-like API for partners looking to add P&C to their suite of consumer product offerings. We’re on a mission to unlock access to home insurance for everyone in America.”
Young Alfred was built to connect insurance carriers to the digital-savvy shopper. And online insurance forms are nothing new, but allowing homeowners to compare and bind coverage without a phone call has been uncharted territory.
Even though the company has removed the phone call from the home insurance transaction, Young Alfred still has licensed agents on staff for providing professional advice when it is needed. Plus Young Alfred allows the customer to choose how they want to shop either via email, text, chat, call, or nothing at all.
“Young Alfred matches consumers to the insurance best-suited to their personal needs in minutes. Utilizing data, integrations and machine learning, the company optimizes the customer experience and finds the best results,” added Zach Bratun-Glennon, partner at Gradient Ventures — who will be joining Young Alfred’s board. “This fits with insurance carriers’ goals because each carrier has different priorities for the policies and risks that they want to underwrite.”
