Accelerating Impact: Announcing Our Series B Venture Funding
It’s been just eight months since we launched Archipelago, and I’m excited to announce the successful close of our Series B financing, raising an additional $34 million in venture investment to power the next phase of our investment-driven growth. Scale Venture Partners led the round, with strong follow-ons from our prior rounds’ investors Canaan Partners, Ignition Partners, and Zigg Capital. Principals from Stone Point Capital, a private equity firm that focuses on the financial services industry including the insurance and real estate services sectors, along with Prologis Ventures, the corporate venture capital arm of Prologis, the world’s leader in logistics real estate solutions and Archipelago’s first customer, also participated in the round. To date, we’ve now raised over $55 million to transform how large owners of commercial property use AI to drive data-driven decisions to manage their property risks and improve their insurance outcomes.
We just launched in August 2020, and there are now already over 330,000 commercial properties totaling over $2 trillion of total insured value (TIV) on Archipelago, and the figures are growing each and every week. Leading owners and managers of commercial real estate, owners like Prologis, along with six of the top 15 CRE owners in North America, along with many more, are using Archipelago to integrate and enrich their property data, across the lifecycle of their assets, and power their insurance placements. Over the past three months alone, hundreds of insurance underwriters and insurance brokers have also experienced Archipelago, receiving in lieu of archaic spreadsheets and email attachments, links to high-quality customer submission data via a rich, secure and efficient SaaS experience.
Driving this rate of adoption at the intersection of two massive global markets - commercial property and commercial insurance - is the convergence of powerful market dynamics. Insurance markets are “hard”, with rising premiums; Covid is accelerating digital transformation; and property owners’ resiliency initiatives are prioritizing the imperative for more proactive strategies to manage exposures and risk.
Beyond these factors, our growth is being driven by focusing on our customers’ success, by:
- Making it easy
- Earning trust
- Delivering impact, now
Making it Easy
We’re now able to ingest customer data and enrich it in days: customers simply upload their documents onto the platform; their Statement of Values, along with documents such as property due diligence reports, risk engineering inspections, structural specification, roof warranties (and so on), and our ML, “machine-first, human-in-the-loop” takes it from there.
Earning Trust
Prior to launching last August, we spent 18 months heads-down with our foundational customers, quietly working with them to develop our platform, onboard their data, and deliver real business impact. We’ve earned their trust, and these customers have become our strongest advocates, they are referencing us to their peers in the risk management community, and connecting us with their partners in the insurance market.
Delivering Impact, Now
We are on a mission to deliver transformational value. Yet we’re also focused on delivering business impact, now. We launched with a great platform that makes it easy for our customers, the risk managers of commercial property owners, to replace their archaic spreadsheet-based SOVs and efficiently produce enriched and trusted datasets they can securely share with their brokers and insurers via Archipelago that highlights their differentiations. Since launch, we’ve also extended our platform, enabling our customers’ insurers and brokers to digitize as well, close the loop, ultimately creating the data-planes to enable more efficient and scalable insurance markets and more innovative coverage solutions.
By focusing intensely on customers' success, by making it easy, earning their trust, and delivering business impact, now, we’re achieving our milestones. It’s this, actioned by a passionate and talented multi-disciplinary team, partnering with fantastic customers, all fueled by strategic and supportive investors (thanks to everyone in this Archipelago trifecta!), that will make our mission a success: AI at scale to digitize risk, driving more efficient insurance markets, and catalyzing more resilient commercial properties, worldwide.
