Sayata adds $35M to Series A for business insurance

Insurance broker and carrier marketplace Sayata took in $35 million in additional funds toward its Series A after raising $17 million in funds last August.

Pitango Growth and Hanaco Ventures co-led the extension, with participation from previous investors Team8 Capital, Vertex Ventures, Elron Ventures and OurCrowd.

The new funding follows over 10 times revenue growth in 2021 for the Boston-based company. Founded two years ago, the company offers a way for small and medium businesses to secure insurance.

To get insurance, these businesses typically go through an insurance broker rather than go directly to the insurance provider, Asaf Lifshitz, co-founder and CEO of Sayata, said via email.

“The process above is much more time intensive and manual,” Lifshitz said. “Securing business insurance takes a big chunk of a broker’s day. Hours are spent gathering quotes, helping the client make sense of them, processing applications and a lot of back and forth with insurance providers to finalize coverage.”

Instead, Sayata developed a marketplace that is fully automated and done online to provide several insurance quotes from leading insurance providers based on a few pieces of information about the business inputted by the broker. Those quotes, along with customized marketing materials on the plans, are forwarded to the business to select and secure coverage.

With this approach, brokers using Sayata are able to offer customers more and better coverage options and respond to requests faster. That and an easy process means clients often go with the insurance offered by Sayata’s broker partners, Lifshitz said.

To date, Sayata has more than 1,000 users representing over 100 brokerage and carrier partners. It works with insurance providers, including Axis, Brit, Hiscox and Tokio Marine, as well as leading technological managing general agents at At-Bay, Coalition, Cowbell and Corvus.

The company has raised a total of $60 million since being founded in 2017 by Lifshitz, Avishay Maya and Iddan Golomb. The additional capital will enable the company to add to its headcount of 47, up from 17 at the same time last year.

It also enables the company to go after more of the small and medium-sized business insurance market that Lifshitz estimates is over $100 billion just in the United States.

“There is a lot of market demand for a better way to secure commercial insurance for SMBs,” he said. “Currently, the company primarily offers cyber insurance on the platform, and our clients have specifically asked for us to add more lines of insurance to the Sayata platform. Extending the current round is a great way to expand into new lines of coverage faster to meet that demand.”