Insurance co’s stand to lose billions from disasters like the LA fires; Comulate raises $20M to build tech to help them work more smoothly

Unimaginable disasters like the fires in Los Angeles with their hundreds of billions of dollars in destruction put a huge focus on the role the insurance industry plays in the process of rebuilding. Those events will also lead to major financial losses at the insurance companies themselves. And longer term, all of this will put a spotlight on how well insurance companies are run behind the scenes. Today, a startup that’s building technology for that purpose is announcing a funding round on the back of fast growth. 

Comulate, which builds tools to help insurance companies manage billing and revenue operations, has closed a round of $20 million, a Series B that it will be using to expand its tech stack to cover more functions and to scale operations. 

Bond and strategic backer Workday — the back office giant — are co-leading the round. The funding is coming after Comulate’s experienced a barnstorming year (in the good sense). 

In 2024, the startup tripled revenues (it doesn’t disclose what those revenues are except to say that they are in the tens of millions). It was getting so much inbound business from large firms that — for what its worth — it said it skipped raising a Series A and went directly to Series B. 

Comulate company had previously only raised $5 million from investors that included Spark Capital. It’s not disclosing valuation.

Jordan Katz, the CEO who co-founded the company with CTO Michael Mattheakis, said in an interview that the pair did not set out to build a startup targeting the insurance industry. 

Initially, the two — who respectively worked at Asana and Brex — wanted to build tools for people like themselves. “SaaS for SaaS,” said Katz. There was one small problem, however. 

“There’s a lot of software out there that does very similar things, built by other software professionals who know how to build good software for problems they’ve experienced,” he said. “We just felt Silicon Valley didn’t need more software for itself.”

So they intentionally changed focus to insurance, he said, an area they knew very little about.

It was a lucky hunch. Insurance is one of the many industries that seem tech-adjacent (it’s often coupled with financial services) but in truth has been largely ignored when it comes to new technology, in particular vertical-specific solutions. 

For example, in the case of billing and revenue management, a lot of the tooling that companies have been using has been generic enterprise at best, and at worst populated with a lot of manual processes that are error-prone and time-consuming. (Workday, the co-lead investor here, is a prime example of that wide-platform approach: Comulate’s narrow focus was one reason why Workday invested.)

The problem that Comulate is targeting is a classic one in enterprise IT: typically, a process is largely ignored and accepted for what it is, until something critical happens where systems are stretched and they break under pressure.

“It’s a sleepy but critical area,” said Jay Simons, the general partner at Bond. Simons himself has first-hand experience of building “SaaS for SaaS”, as the former president of Atlassian.

If the world is your oyster, “sleepy but critical” is nearly a perfect formula when it comes to figuring out what to target in enterprise software. 

Comulate says that its customers today include brokers the Baldwin Group, IMA Financial, Risk Strategies, and The Hilb Group.

While the startup does not bill itself as an “AI” startup, it does lean into the idea that “every company is now an AI company.” Comulate uses machine learning to speed up processes and AI tooling in areas like analytics. The company claims that it has saved customers some 260,000 hours in work as a result.