AI Insurance Brokerage Harper Insure Raises $47M
Harper Insure has closed $47 million in combined seed and Series A funding to build an AI-native commercial insurance brokerage. The raise highlights strong investor interest in platforms that use data-driven analytics for complex industries like risk assessment.
The Series A funding was led by Emergence Capital, with participation from Y Combinator and Peak XV, among others. This round represents the largest publicly disclosed Series A ever raised by a Black founder, CEO Dakotah Rice. Founders Dakotah Rice and Tushar Nair are veterans of Goldman Sachs and a previous startup venture. Rice was inspired by his family's struggles with the insurance industry in rural Alabama, where he saw his uncle's trucking company fail due to the high costs and complexities of financing and insurance. Harper Insure's proprietary AI models automate the labor-intensive brokerage process, including reading applications, routing submissions to a network of over 165 underwriters, and managing follow-ups. This approach allows the company to reduce the time it takes for a business to get coverage from several weeks down to just 24 to 48 hours. In its first 13 months of operation, the company has already served more than 5,000 businesses across the United States. The brokerage focuses on complex commercial risks for small and medium-sized businesses in sectors like manufacturing, healthcare, construction, and transportation. Unlike startups that sell software to existing agencies, Harper operates as a full-stack brokerage, owning the entire customer relationship. This allows the AI-driven efficiencies to directly translate into faster and better service for clients, such as logistics firms that cannot onboard drivers without timely coverage. The new capital is earmarked for expanding the engineering, account management, and operations teams. The company also plans to deepen its relationships with insurance carriers and further invest in its AI infrastructure.
