Today is another milestone for all of us at Ushur, for our customers and for our partners. I’m thrilled to announce that just three months after our over-subscribed $25M Series B round, led by Third Point Ventures, 8VC and Pentland Ventures, we have extended our Series B investment by securing another $5M in funding. More importantly, we now have two more stalwarts of the investment world as partners in this journey of ours: Aflac Ventures joins us as a strategic investor and Iron Pillar will help us accelerate our customer and talent acquisition.
This latest round of funding builds on an exceptional year for Ushur:
Our partnership with Iron Pillar enables us to tap into their fast growing international network in Europe and emerging markets and gives us access to customers, partners and talent pool.
I’m humbled by all the support and the trust our customers, our partners and our investors have put in us, best manifested in the words of Nadeem Khan, President of Aflac Global Ventures: “Ushur’s ability to deliver on a truly omnichannel customer experience will make a tremendous impact across the entire industry: improving member satisfaction, opening new markets for providers and helping agents and brokers gain efficiency.”
On behalf of everyone at Ushur, Thank You.
This extension to our Series B round serves two key goals: growing our go-to-market function to better serve our customers and gaining strategic partners for our target markets.
When we first announced our Series B, I wrote in a blog post that we’ve heard the signal from the market loud and clear: high-contact businesses, such as insurance providers, are looking to digitally transform their customer engagement, across all channels, keeping costs low while raising NPS scores. If you can help achieve one or two of these metrics, it is a win. If you can help them achieve all three, that’s a big deal.
Ushur has done just that.
In the words of Ken Lynch, Head of Information Services at Irish Life: “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.”
These testaments represent our plan in action. Ushur’s Series B extension will help us continue to execute this plan – on a global scale, with the help of our new strategic partners.
In addition to expanding our leadership team, we plan to invest heavily in our R&D, engineering and customer success teams. Our go-to-market teams will continue to grow rapidly along with our partner network, meeting our goal to be where our customers are – no matter where they are in the world.
In Aflac Ventures, Ushur has gained not only a strategic partner, but a key advisor as we continue to make deep inroads into the world of insurance.
It is well established now that intelligent automation has a transformational impact on traditional insurers. For instance, in the words of our customer, Irish Life, their first Ushur project made them rethink their entire approach to customer engagement.
We are transforming an industry that has historically delegated the relationship with the end-customers to brokers and third parties and we are enabling them to learn how to deliver the best customer experience. We are doing this with an AI-powered platform that drops in and works with minimal effort, and a team of experts who understand how to build and deliver these great experiences. Afterall, digital transformation survivors know that modernization has a ripple effect far beyond just product deployment. It’s up to us to make sure our customers get the most value out of Ushur — and we can do that by giving them the technical and cultural blueprints for success that we have mastered.
Lastly, with a rapidly growing customer base, we now have insurers across the globe using Ushur to tackle their own set of challenges that are unique to their regional market environments. As we expand our footprint, Ushur is cognizant that we’re creating products with a global reach, and our workforce, our outreach and our ecosystems need to reflect that.
For all of these reasons, Aflac Ventures is an ideal partner and advisor for Ushur, passing on decades of industry knowledge, trust and credibility that are critical to a fast-growing startup like Ushur as we continue to transform the world of insurance.
In the world of startups, we often hear about blitzscaling and categories turning into rocket ships. At Ushur, while we remain humble yet passionate, our drive to growth and success remains forever grounded in our core vision: a relentless focus on developing and delivering world-class intelligent automation solutions that drive every single customer engagement into a transformative experience.
If the past year has taught me anything, it’s that as long we stay true to our vision, there is plenty of room at the top.
