Life Insurance Startup Ladder Raises $100M

Digital life insurance company Ladder raised $100 million in a new round of funding, the company said Monday.

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Ladder offers between $100,000 and $8 million in life insurance term policies for people between the ages of 20 and 60. Users can sign up through their phone and adjust their coverage as their life changes. Through Ladder’s app, users can add more coverage if, for example, they have another child and need more life insurance. Similarly, they can reduce their life insurance and premium if they pay down a mortgage or their children grow up.

“Your life is dynamic, your life insurance should be dynamic too,” CEO Jamie Hale said in an interview.

The company is on track to issue $30 billion worth of coverage by the end of 2021 (it issues its own policies), and saw its revenue grow 4.5x over the past year,

Ladder plans on using the new Thomvest Ventures and OMERS Growth Equity co-led funding to scale its engineering team, and build out its code base and digital interaction with customers, Hale said. It will also be focused on growth and rolling out with new partners. 

According to Thomvest Managing Partner Don Butler, investing in Ladder was “painfully obvious,” given the company’s growth, customer satisfaction and other factors. Ladder’s bringing life insurance into the modern digital age, where expectations have been set for consumers in terms of what they should be able to get done with an app, he said.

“Completing and buying a policy in five to six minutes versus six to eight weeks of back and forth with maybe an agent and maybe somebody to come out to the home, it’s just a world of difference compared to the industry standard these days,” Butler said.

Ladder’s customers tend to be younger, with the average age being 37, and the majority are first-time buyers of life insurance. Nearly two-thirds of its customers submit their application for life insurance through their phone.

The company’s seen high growth over the past year, and Hale said part of that could have been because of a mindset shift during the pandemic. 

“It made them really think about their people,” Hale said. “‘These people are important to me, I want to make sure these people are taken care of.’” 

Ladder last raised money with a $37.5 million Series C in February 2020. 

Illustration: Dom Guzman