Insurers 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 cause hundreds of billions of dollars in destruction, and put a huge focus on the role the insurance industry plays in the process of rebuilding. Those events 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 insurers manage billing and revenue operations, has closed a $20 million Series B round that it will use to expand its tech stack to cover more functions and scale operations. 

Bond and Workday — the back-office giant — are co-leading the round. The funding comes after a a barnstorming year (in the good sense) for Comulate. 

In 2024, the startup tripled revenues and 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. The company didn’t disclose any numbers except to say that its revenue is in the tens of millions.

Comulate had previously only raised $5 million from investors, one of which was Spark Capital. It is not disclosing its valuation.

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

Initially, they wanted to build tools for people like themselves. “SaaS for SaaS,” said Katz. There was a 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 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, it has been largely ignored when it comes to new technology, particularly vertical-specific solutions. 

For example, in the case of billing and revenue management, a lot of the tooling being used is generic enterprise at best, and at worst, populated with a lot of manual processes. Workday, the co-lead investor here, is a prime example of that wide-platform approach, and Comulate’s narrow focus was one reason why Workday invested.

Comulate is targeting is a classic problem in enterprise IT: Typically, a process is largely ignored and accepted for what it is, until something critical happens, 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 for figuring out what to target in enterprise software. 

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

The startup does not bill itself as an “AI” startup, but 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 it has saved customers some 260,000 hours in work as a result.