Glow CEO Samad Wahedi didn't want to build another sales tool.
After working in engineering and product roles for years, the 43-year-old Wahedi decided to solve a problem that hit closer to home.
"I wanted to do something more mission driven,” Wahedi told me. “I've done the tech play, I've done the SaaS play. I wasn't interested in building another tool that would help sales people be more efficient."
Wahedi comes from a family of small business owners, and he watched them struggle with balancing how to spend time and resources on growing revenue versus managing risk for critical, but expensive, issues such as workers' compensation.
"I realized that 90% of my brother's time was spent on revenue, revenue, revenue. Never really thought about risk or how to mitigate risk until it was too late," Wahedi said.
So in 2018, he founded Glow in San Francisco to automate matching up small businesses with the right insurance.
On Tuesday, Glow announced a $22.5 million Series A round that was led by Cota Capital and also included AV8 Ventures, Markd, Startup Venture Capital and Maiden Re. It brings the company's total funding to $28 million.
Rather than trying to cut out agents, Glow acts as one and works with carriers — effectively minimizing its own customer acquisition costs — and takes a cut of the premiums that are issued to small businesses. Glow doesn't charge small business customers any fees.
"We're gonna make sure you have the right coverage regardless of the underwriters and we're gonna make sure you're not taken advantage of on price. That promise requires its own very sophisticated technology and capability," Wahedi said. "That's what we offer to our customers. Digitizing that broker relationship."
To do this, Glow taps into a suite of data, both public and private, and uses artificial intelligence to pre-approve small businesses for specific types of coverage. It primarily offers workers compensation but can also match business customers to just about any other type of commercial insurance including general liability.
Essentially, Glow takes the onus off of small business owners to figure out what sort of coverage they need and digitizes the process to make it easier and more cost effective — for both businesses and insurers.
"You gotta sell a lot of cupcakes to pay for your insurance premium, and if you're overpaying by 20% to 30%, that's painful," Wahedi said.
Glow currently has 25 employees and Wahedi wants to triple the team as he eyes a national rollout and expanding into more types of industries. The company currently serves customers primarily in California.
Eventually, it might look into expanding internationally but the market and need is massive enough just in the U.S., so Glow will be focused on growing here for the foreseeable future, Wahedi told me.
This story has been updated to clarify that Glow works with insurance carriers, not brokers.
