Liberate, a San Francisco-based artificial intelligence (AI) startup, has successfully raised $50 million in an equity funding round led by Battery Ventures. This investment elevates the company’s valuation to $300 million post-money. The round also saw participation from new investor Canapi Ventures and existing backers Redpoint Ventures, Eclipse, and Commerce Ventures.
Addressing Industry Challenges
The insurance sector is currently grappling with escalating operational costs, outdated legacy systems, and heightened customer expectations. Particularly in the non-life insurance segment, global premium growth is projected to decelerate through 2026 due to intensified competition, diminished rate momentum, and emerging cost pressures such as tariffs. While some insurers have experimented with AI, many initial efforts faltered because of fragmented data and rigid workflows. However, the industry is now transitioning towards comprehensive AI adoption, embedding it into core operations rather than merely overlaying it. Liberate is poised to capitalize on this transformative shift.
Innovative AI Solutions
Established in 2022, Liberate specializes in developing AI systems tailored for property and casualty insurers, with a focus on sales, service, and claims processing. At the forefront of their offerings is Nicole, a voice AI assistant designed to manage both inbound and outbound calls, facilitating policy sales and addressing service requests. Supporting Nicole is a network of reasoning-based AI agents that integrate seamlessly with insurers’ existing systems, gathering context and generating responses delivered by Nicole without human intervention.
These AI agents are engineered to execute comprehensive tasks, including policy quoting, claims processing, and endorsement updates, thereby automating routine functions. Additionally, they operate across multiple communication channels such as SMS and email, enabling insurers to engage with customers through various platforms while streamlining daily workflows.
Leadership and Vision
Liberate’s co-founder and CEO, Amrish Singh, brings valuable experience from his nearly four-year tenure at Metromile, a car insurance firm owned by Lemonade, where he worked in back-office operations and technology. Singh collaborated with Ryan Eldridge, Liberate’s Vice President of Engineering and a fellow former Metromile executive, and Jason St. Pierre, the company’s Chief Product Officer, who has held positions at Twitter, Google, and Verily, Alphabet’s life sciences division.
Singh highlighted the industry’s growth aspirations, stating, Insurance companies want to grow, but they’re not able to do so. It’s the status quo where the opportunity is.
Proven Impact and Expansion Plans
Liberate’s AI systems have demonstrated significant impact, with clients reporting an average sales increase of 15% and a 23% reduction in costs. The company currently serves over 60 customers, focusing on the top 100 carriers and agencies that collectively represent 70% to 80% of the U.S. property and casualty insurance market.
Over the past year, Liberate has scaled its operations from 10,000 monthly automations to 1.3 million automated resolutions. These include direct customer interactions via its voice AI, as well as back-office tasks managed by AI agents integrated into carriers’ core systems.
To ensure accuracy and compliance, Liberate employs an internal tool called Supervisor to monitor all interactions between its AI agents and customers. This software flags issues or anomalies and escalates them to human agents when necessary, maintaining high standards of service.
Singh emphasized the importance of industry-specific solutions, noting, The advantage of servicing only one industry, and within that servicing only three specific use cases, is that you can put a lot more guardrails in place.
The recent $50 million funding will be utilized to enhance Liberate’s reasoning capabilities and support broader deployment across insurers. To date, the startup has raised a total of $72 million and employs approximately 50 people.
Investor Confidence
Marcus Ryu, a general partner at Battery Ventures and former executive at Guidewire Software, is joining Liberate’s board. He expressed confidence in Liberate’s approach, stating, Mapping the process, modeling it, and making sure that all the systems connections are in place, well tested, and appropriately designed so that you can complete the task, not just communicate, is what Liberate is doing.
Conclusion
Liberate’s innovative AI solutions are poised to transform the insurance industry’s back-office operations, addressing longstanding challenges and enabling insurers to achieve growth and efficiency. With substantial funding and a clear vision, Liberate is well-positioned to lead the integration of AI into the core functions of insurance carriers and agencies.
