Insurtech start-up Ascend bags $250m financing offer from HSCM Bermuda

Insurtech start-up Ascend, an advanced insurance payments platform, has secured a $30 million Series A in equity funding, bringing the total funding raised to $39 million along with a $250 million lending commitment to finance insurance premium loans through its platform facilitated by re/insurer  Hudson Structured Capital Management (HSCM Bermuda).

Ascend will use the funds to boost its modern insurance payment offering, and expand its team with "dozens" of new hires. The lending capacity offered by HSCM will be used to streamline both commercial and personal lines of insurance loans.

The Series A funding was led by Index Ventures with participation from new investors such as Distributed Ventures and its anchor limited partner NFP, a global property and casualty insurance brokerage, HSCM Bermuda, XYZ Ventures, and a series of strategic angel investors including Garret Koehn (investor at The Batchery and the president of CRC Insurance); Courtney Leimkulher (founding partner at Springbank Collective and former CFO of Marsh); Mischief, (a venture capital fund led by the CEO of payments infrastructure company Plaid); Nilam Ganenthiran (former president of Instacart); Nathaniel Manning (co-founder of Kettle Insurance); and other fintech operators including Misha Esipov (CEO and founder at Nova Credit), Marc Bhargava (co-founder of Tagomi and currently at Coinbase); Mahdi Raza (partner at Exponent Capital), and Charley Ma (General Manager at Alloy). Also participating were existing investors First Round Capital, Susa Ventures, and FirstMark Capital.

Ascend's payments APIs and no code products automate insurance payments end-to-end — from an online point of sale with buy now, pay later financing to the distribution of commissions and carrier payables. This enables insurance brokers, MGAs, and carriers to sell more policies by eliminating labor-intensive, expensive processes.

"We've seen an enormous surge in demand over the last six months since we launched. Our payment software greatly reduces purchase friction for customers buying insurance while simultaneously reducing or eliminating traditionally labor-intensive operational processes for brokerages, MGAs, and carriers," said Praveen Chekuri (pictured), co-CEO, and co-founder at Ascend.

"With this new funding, we can meet that demand and help more customers use Ascend's embedded payments and buy-now-pay-later offering. We're excited to have the backing and financial support of these investors to help insurance distributors and carriers sell their products more effectively and build out the future of the insurance infrastructure."

Mark Goldberg, partner at Index Ventures, commented: "Ascend will redefine how insurance is bought and sold for the coming decade and we're excited to see this team execute and grow so quickly."

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