Sayata, a Boston-based startup offering small and medium-sized businesses a way to get insurance, announced Monday that it has added $35 million of additional funding to its Series A. The round, which was initially announced last August, originally had $17 million, bringing its new total to $52 million. Pitango Growth and Hanaco Ventures co-led the extension, along with several previous investors including Team8 Capital and Vertex Ventures.
This news is on the heels of what Isaac Hillel, a managing partner at Pitango, describes as “staggering” growth for Sayata — 10x revenue growth in 2021 alone. Now, co-founder and CEO Asaf Lifshitz says the startup will use this fresh funding to grow its team to keep up with surging demand, as well as expand into new lines of insurance.
“The market really loves the product. Our growth reflects that,” Lifshitz said in an email to Built In. “We can’t wait to bring our broker partners more insurance coverage options for their clients as well as add more meaningful functionality to the platform.”
Sayata is disrupting an industry that, traditionally, has been fairly tedious and manual. Usually, in order to get insurance, small business owners have to go through an insurance broker, who then spends hours gathering quotes, juggling conversations between the business owner and insurance providers, and processing applications. Instead, Sayata automates this whole process. Brokers just input a few pieces of information, and in seconds the platform can deliver multiple insurance quotes tailored to a given client’s needs. Then, once a quote is chosen by the client, brokers can complete the deal right on Sayata’s site.
Sayata’s services are more than just a convenience for insurance brokers and the small business owners they work with, says Lior Prosor, a founding partner at Hanaco Ventures. He seems to think the startup is sitting right at the heart of what he calls “insurtech 2.0.”
“We believe the next multi-billion dollar insurtech companies will not be the new consumer brands like 1.0, but rather solutions that transform the industry’s current manual back-end processes into streamlined digital solutions,” Prosor said in a statement. “Sayata has proven more than adept at automating the distribution process of acquiring insurance brokers. We think they are just in the first inning of tapping into the $100 billion SMB insurance market in the U.S.”
