Pie Insurance is the winner of the 2022 Colorado Inno award in the fintech category.
Pie Insurance raised $315 million in September, more than doubling its total capital and snagging one of the largest financing rounds this year among all U.S.-based property and casualty insurtech companies. Now, it’s looking to expand into new lines of business and become a full-stack carrier.
Location: Denver
Top Exec: Dax Craig, president
What inspired your business? The idea for Pie started in 2011 with Pie’s co-founder and president, Dax Craig. At the time, Dax was CEO of Valen Analytics, a Colorado-based data and analytics provider to property and casualty insurance carriers. He was frustrated because insurance companies weren’t using Valen’s predictive analytics solutions as he’d envisioned. Dax’s lightbulb moment came during a conversation with a close friend and advisor who incidentally went through a similar situation in the consumer credit industry. Rather than trying to convince others to use the analytics appropriately, Dax’s advisor encouraged him to start his own insurance company — using the analytics as intended. Dax kept building Valen but had the idea for Pie tucked away until he was connected with Pie’s co-founder and CEO, John Swigart, through common investors. John spent more than a decade at Esurance building one of the earliest versions of an insurtech, and the two realized the opportunity sitting in front of them.
What was Pie’s biggest accomplishment in the past year? Most recently we raised a $315M Series D round of funding in September 2022, more than doubling Pie’s total capital raised to $615 million.
What about your biggest challenge? Recently we’ve seen fintechs and insurtechs face criticism in the public markets, which has inevitably created some skepticism [about] the viability of insurtechs overall. This has created a challenging fundraising environment, partly due to many early-wave fintech and insurtechs that focused on growing fast and building technology-first insurance companies. This strategy came at the expense of delivering strong unit economics and the sustainable loss ratio performance required to run a sustainable insurance company. Pie is overcoming this challenge because we deeply understand that we’re an insurance company first and must deliver on insurance business metrics like loss ratio, customer acquisition cost and retention rates in order to prove we can be a long-term investment.
What are your goals for the next year? Pie is focused on strategically growing, including expanding into new lines of business, fully transitioning to a full-stack carrier, further innovating upon our advanced proprietary pricing algorithms and delivering world-class user and product experiences directly to small businesses and the partner agents who serve them.
Colorado Inno Fintech finalists:
- Finder
- Infinicept
