With $2.6 million in funding, Gabi wants to get you a better deal on insurance

Most people are overpaying for car or home insurance, but many don’t know by how much or even how to compare different plans or carriers. That’s where Gabi comes in. The startup, which has raised $2.6 million in funding, wants to help users find the best, least expensive home and car insurance plans.

Much of Gabi’s value proposition comes from its ease-of-use. By entering in your login credentials through its mobile app, Gabi can review your current policy and find you the best carrier and plan for your needs.

That means consumers won’t have to go through the hassle of filling out endless amounts of paperwork or having to answer a set of questions they didn’t know the answers to the last time they got a new insurance policy.

Unlike most insurance comparison sites, which require users to fill in a bunch of information before they can make recommendations, Gabi scans your existing plan and knows what coverage you need before it shows you new comparable options. The company will also recommend more or less coverage based on a customer’s current plan and usage.

Building the technology to power that wasn’t easy. Unlike the banking world, where companies like Yodlee and Plaid make it easy for third-party apps to login and scrape information from a user’s account, there’s no comparable API for insurance policy comparison, according to Gabi founder and CEO Hanno Fichtner.

Gabi isn’t just a comparison engine to help you pick the best insurance product just today. Unlike other comparison sites, it isn’t just operating a lead-gen engine for the carriers by which it makes money off one-time referrals.

The company is a licensed insurance agent and wants to win over your business for the long term. That means that if rates ever change, or if you can get a better deal somewhere else, Gabi will make those suggestions and help you switch. That also means it has a more sustainable business model, since it’s making an annual commission on every policy it helps underwrite.

“We believe this is a much more consumer-friendly model where it’s not just about making a quick amount of money but being a long-term partner,” Fichtner told me.

To tackle what is a huge market, the company has raised $2.6 million in seed funding investors like SV Angel,  Ronny Conway’s A.Capital and Germany’s Project A Capital. While Gabi is currently active in California, the company will be using the funding to expand its availability into other markets.