Munich Re Ventures backs insurtech Capitola

Capitola, a Mountain View, Calif.-based startup building technology for the commercial insurance industry, raised a $15.6 million Series A led by Munich Re Ventures, Capitola CEO Sivan Iram tells Axios exclusively.

Why it matters: A strategic investor like Munich Re lends credibility to Capitola as it brings its technology into the insurance industry.

What it does: Capitola provides a cloud-based SaaS platform to help commercial insurance brokers better serve their clients, as well as a marketplace to connect brokers with carriers.

• The platform supports property, casualty and specialty coverage lines and integrates with existing agency systems.
• It also eliminates manual data entry for the broker, and provides smart recommendations for coverage with AI-driven risk appetite matching.
• Based on industry benchmarks, Capitola claims it can reduce the time it takes to place business by 47% and that customers can produce 30% more business with the same number of people.

What they’re saying: “Brokers spend so much of their time doing manual, repetitive tasks, and they don't really leverage data in a big way to find the capacity they need for their customers,” Iram says.

• While making data entry more efficient, Iram says Capitola’s matching A.I. increases market responsiveness, since brokers no longer send requests to carriers that are not interested in a certain kind of business.
• “For the underwriters, that increases their inbound-to-quote ratio and quote-to-buy ratio by better match supply and demand of commercial risk,” Iram added.

Between the lines: Iram says Capitola received multiple term sheets, and chose Munich Re due to the reinsurer's carrier relationships and the possibility of tapping into that network.

Of note: Lightspeed Venture Partners, which led Capitola’s $5 million seed round in 2021, also participated in its Series A.