After spending two years developing a product to automate the integration of car insurance damage estimate data for repairs between insurance companies and body shops, Estify has raised $1.5 million to bring its technology to market.
There’s a rift between insurance companies and repair shops, explains Jordan Furniss, one of Estify’s co-founders. “[Insurers] write up a preliminary estimate for what a repair should cost and then repair shops have to duplicate that estimate into their systems.”
Estify began as a project that Furniss and his co-founders first thought about tackling while still in college in 2012. “We were young enough and naive enough to try and solve this. So we went to the shops and we spent a lot of time with these body shops; observing their behavior and how managers work and how owners work,” Furniss recalls.
After spending a few months thinking about the industry’s biggest pain points, the company decided to focus on the integration of insurance estimates. Estify tested its service through the end of 2013 and launched the service in the beginning of the year.
For Furniss, it’s a huge roll of the dice. He dropped out of school with only a semester left to participate in the AmplifyLA accelerator in the summer of 2012 and start the company.
The company raised a seed financing from Romulus Capital and ff Venture Capital, and now the two firms have come back to invest another $1.5 million in Estify.
Estify has two offices with 30 employees, one in California and one in Utah, and then outsourced work centers in India and Peru. “Our international offices are where the grunt work is being done,” says Furniss. “We have about 10 people in Peru and 5 currently over in India.”
The company operates off of a monthly subscription business, where shops typically pay $299 per month. The company is in 400 shops now, and according to Furniss, it’s the fastest adoption of any web-based service in the industry. “It’s kind of like a drug,” says Furniss. “They get hooked on it.”