Announcing Ushur’s $25M Series B funding

I’m thrilled to share that Ushur has secured $25 million in Series B funding! Today, we welcomed new partners to our team led by Third Point Ventures, with our friends at 8VC joining as well.

This new investment is more than just a vote of confidence. It’s a testament to the talented team we have assembled, the excellence of the technology platform we’ve created, and our dedication to our happy customers.

It’s also further validation that we’re onto something big.

The early years of a startup are about scanning for signal. You’re constantly searching for product-market fit. You may have great technology, but you’re discovering who needs it and why. Or you are figuring out how to sell it.

Those days are behind us. We hear our signal loud and clear. We’ve created the most complete, easiest-to-use, AI and cloud-native automation platform. It’s a compelling proposition for any industry. But for our Fortune 500 customers in the insurance industry, it’s more than that. It’s transformational.

Insurance companies are remarkable institutions. The most successful have survived more than a hundred years, the oldest more than 200. You don’t weather war, depression, and profound societal change by making reckless decisions. You exercise caution. You take care of your customers, building trust and loyalty. You make prudent, deliberative choices so you can pass the business along to the next generation, and the next after that.

But today, even insurance companies are subject to the tempo of modern business. They face competition from digital-native startups. They see their customers’ habits and expectations evolving. People text more and talk less on the phone. Customers believe — rightly — that they call the shots in their business relationships. The consumer has gotten used to serving themselves at their own pace, on their own schedule, on their own terms.

Insurance companies, for their part, are “high-contact” businesses. They have to process a tremendous volume of customer, broker, and agent interactions every day. They want to get closer to their constituents and communicate with them more effectively. They want to steer email questions to the right subject matter experts, and send relevant and effective product offers to brokers, agents, and customers who actually need them rather than blasting out mailers that just get tossed in the recycling.

The question they all have is: “How do we do that?”

Ushur is the answer. We give insurers a way to dramatically streamline and update how they engage with consumers without sacrificing their core, tried-and-true values . And it’s a way that actually works. By combining conversation as a service with process automation, and delivering this through a Cloud-native, No-Code builder, we enable our insurance customers to quickly deploy and see value. That value is realized in the form of servicing customer workflows rapidly, reducing expense ratios by automating manual tasks, and enhancing the customer experience that is measured through a significant increase in NPS and customer satisfaction scores.

If you can help insurers achieve one or two of these metrics, it is a win. If you can help them with all three, that’s a big deal.

Take the experience of Ken Lynch, Head of Information Services at Irish Life, Ireland’s leading life insurer, realizing how quickly the company saw returns from Ushur’s AI:

“The results we got were phenomenal, and we hadn't written a line of code. We’d never seen anyone who could do that. From our standpoint, Ushur were the only ones out there truly doing something different.”

But the complete Ushur package is more than just AI and workflows. It’s in our ability to execute. We’ve learned a lot over the past year. We’ve become very good—and very fast—at getting insurers up and running, to the point where we’re now measuring Time to Value in mere weeks. Not months or years, but weeks, during a global pandemic, at some of the largest companies in the world.

Which speaks to the observation from Mike Simonds, COO Unum Group: “As impressive as their technology is, the quality of the Ushur team may be what sets them apart. They really care about our success.”

It’s true -- we do care. And more than that, we’re dialed in. Over the next year, we’re going to take our technology and everything we’ve learned about putting Ushur to work, and go to market with even greater intensity, a faster cadence, and a vastly expanded scope.

It’s an exciting moment, and one we could have only reached through the hard and skilled work of our team and the faith of our investors and customers. Completing this fundraising round in the middle of a pandemic was a humbling experience, to say the least. We will continue to increase our differentiation by investing in our product and people, as we accelerate our customer acquisition.

It’s a good day to look forward, and we have a lot to look forward to.