Exclusive: GloveBox Inks $3M To Outfit Insurance Agents With Mobile Functionalities

GloveBox is creating a single sign-on mobile platform that enables independent insurance agents to provide a self-service mobile marketplace for policyholders that rivals offerings by larger, incumbent carriers.

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The Denver-based startup raised $3 million in seed funding, its first institutional funding, led by Mercato Partners’ Prelude Fund, with participation from Heffernan Insurance Brokers.

Prior to this round, GloveBox was self-funded by co-founders Andy Mathisen, Ryan Mathisen, Sean Mulhern and Alex Rolex, who started the company in 2019 based on their own experiences at Colorado Insurance.

“We saw the pains of running a business and got sick of the trickle-down effect of technology in the insurance space and wanted to build something for clients,” Ryan Mathisen, co-founder and CEO, told Crunchbase News.

GloveBox’s technology enables customers to access all policy documents directly from their insurance carriers of any kind, pay a bill or initiate a claim. As a result, agencies are able to decrease service costs and spend more time on profitable workflows, Mathisen said.

He estimates that 46 percent of property and casualty insurance is written by independent agents. The company intends to use the new funds on product development to address that, as well as to get into commercial business, another area that is underserved, he said.

“Insurtech is the next fintech,” Mathisen added. “You can see how it is evolving, and insurtech is next.”

Indeed, the global insurtech market was valued at $2.72 billion in 2020 and is expected to grow  at a compound annual growth rate of 48.8 percent by 2028. GloveBox’s core subscription model has a $140 million market cap, but once it brings in the digital marketplace component down the road, that will move into the billions, Mathisen said.

Since GloveBox launched its platform in March 2020, approximately 125 agencies have signed up, and there are 35,000 users, Mathisen said. The company has a goal of reaching 1,000 agencies by the end of the year.

Zach Sivertson, managing director at Prelude, said in an interview that GloveBox is taking a unique approach to the insurance industry and even got some of the industry’s biggest independent agents to build application programming interfaces so that they could integrate with GloveBox.

“That is really powerful from our perspective,” Sivertson added. “Technology in the insurance space is so neglected, and there is so much opportunity for change.”

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias