By James Thaler

Feb 3 - Insurance digital infrastructure platform Sure Insurance laid off around 70 staff members on Monday, a move that comes as the Wayne Slavin-led venture has worked to raise additional funds following its October 2021 Series C round, The Insurer can reveal.

The company’s last publicly announced funding round was a $100mn October 2021 Series C co-led by Declaration Partners and European growth investor Kinnevik, with additional participation from WndrCo and existing backers WR Berkley and Menlo Ventures.

That fundraise brought the firm’s total amount raised since its launch to $123.1mn and valued the Santa Monica-based insurtech at $550mn.

At the time, CEO and co-founder Wayne Slavin claimed that the insurtech had been profitable since 2019 and had been growing annual recurring revenue $(ARR)$ by 3x “every year” in the years preceding its 2021 fundraise.

Slavin also disclosed in early 2021 that the company had ARR in the “double-digit millions”.

At the time of its Series C Sure said it planned to use its new capital from its growth round to accelerate its global expansion, speed up new product launches and continue to “streamline embedded insurance customer experiences.”

Sure is understood to have recently pursued a fundraise led by fintech-focused investment bank FT Partners before undertaking the layoffs. It was not immediately clear the types of roles impacted by the workforce cull, which was announced to staff on Monday morning, or the current status of the firm's fundraise.

Data from LinkedIn suggests that Sure’s headcount sits somewhere around 500, meaning around 15 percent of staff were impacted by the reduction-in-force on Monday.

Embedded insurance player

Founded in 2015, Sure describes itself as “the fastest growing leader in digital insurance” and effectively runs an embedded insurance platform providing infrastructure and a software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering.

For agents it provides omnichannel communication, digital workflows, agent distribution, along with rating and quoting engines, policy binding and issuance, as well as premium collection.

Its services also include policy administration, providing a system of record, reporting, and analytics that all leverage API integrations, and claims management services such as providing first notices of loss, adjudication and payments.

Sure says its platform unites “core insurance technologies in one place to centralize critical insurance data and operations” and that it deploys “modular technology components designed to meet the specific needs” of partners’ insurance programs.

The insurtech works with an array of carriers, brands, marketplaces, software companies, MGAs, and TPAs, among others.

Its carrier partners include Assurant, WR Berkley, Chubb, Farmers, Nationwide, and Zurich, among others. The product offerings it currently serves include car rental, travel insurance, home warranty, renters, and product warranty insurance.

Customers also include Intuit, Betterment, Revolut, Carvana, several automotive manufacturers, and a leading global credit card network.

Sure says it works with global brands and market-leading insurance carriers from the Fortune 500 to build and launch sophisticated embedded insurance products on Sure’s SaaS infrastructure to distribute, service, and scale digital insurance.

Among the firms Sure has integrations with include Equifax, Guidewire, LexisNexis, Salesforce, Snowflake, Stripe, Okta, Tableau, Verisk, DocuSign, and Zendesk, among others.

It also says that its platform can be used to complement a trading partner’s existing tech stack by selecting individual components or be employed to achieve all of clients’ insurance distribution, policy, claims, agent, and API goals in a single location.

Sure raised an $8mn Series A funding round led by venerated insurtech venture firm IA Capital, with contributions from Menlo Ventures, FF Venture Capital, Nationwide Ventures, Assurant, and AmTrust.

In a February 2021 TechCrunch article, Sure’s co-founder and CEO Slavin accused IA Capital of funding the launch of what it believed to be a rival firm – Boost Insurance – as Sure sought to cut off information sharing with its lead Series A investor.

The job cuts come amid what is expected to be a rebound in insurtech funding conditions, as interest rates and inflation come down and costs of capital also improve.

The Insurer recently broke the news that homeowners insurtech Kin is working on a fundraise that could value the company at north of $2bn, and reported last week that fellow homeowners insurer Openly raised $193mn in “growth financing” from Eden Global Partners and Allianz X.

However, it is understood that a cohort of insurtech firms who have struggled to reach profitability targets have continued to find the funding environment challenging.

A spokesperson for Sure has been contacted for comment.