New York-based Korr, which has developed cloud-based technology to modernize legacy insurers’ operations, last week raised $3.2 million in pre-seed and seed funding led by Motive Ventures, a unit of Motive Partners, and Tokio Marine Future Fund, the investing arm of the eponymous Japanese insurer. Plug and Play Ventures led the pre-seed round of $1.2 million.
Founded in 2021, Korr has built a cloud-native system that helps insurers migrate on-premise legacy systems to the cloud, and an app that lets insurance agents and carriers save time and costs, while improving customer experience and enabling faster rollout of new products.
Modernizing Insurers
“We started Korr two years ago with the thesis that cloud-native architecture and innovation will drive positive change in insurance, particularly in the post-Covid workplace and marketplace,” said Korr founder and CEO Gregory Ritchie, who previously worked at insurtech firm Guidewire.
“We have invented a forward-thinking product that drives competitive advantage, cutting legacy costs and constraints, and converting decades of historical data out-of-the-box,” added Ritchie, who is a limited partner at San Francisco-based Metzger Ventures.
“As fintech investors, we are acutely aware of how much of financial services and insurance remain dependent on decades-old tech that makes innovation a challenge,” said Harsh Govil, principal at Motive Ventures, the early-stage investment arm of New York-based Motive Partners. “Simple updates to financial or insurance products are costly and take months to implement.”
Tech Underpinnings
At Guidewire, which focuses on property and casualty insurance, Ritchie spent nearly a dozen years, managing customer accounts for MetLife and Amica in the cloud. Korr currently targets a small market segment — long-term care within life insurance — with plans to expand into other areas equally in need of technological upgrades. Ritchie told Axios that Korr’s technology would provide the underpinnings for future advances, such as use of generative AI for underwriting or claims processing.
Japan’s Tokio Marine is not only an investor in Korr but among its earliest customers. Robert Pick, chief information officer of the firm’s North American services unit, said the group’s units around the world have adopted modern solutions from Korr, helping it easily work together with other carriers.
“Korr’s approach is focused on ease of integration and ease of migration, in a cloud-native package, which can fit nicely in a variety of complex environments. Being able to ‘play well with others’ is vital for modern core systems,” said Pick.
Steve Pretre, who led the investment for Tokio Marine Future Fund, pointed at the opportunities ahead of Korr. “There is a large portion of the insurance industry that still runs on legacy technology, often home grown. With the major existing insurance core platforms, those migrations can cost tens of millions of dollars or more,” he said.
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Korr is the first product and team we have seen that has focused on building a highly standardized platform designed to enable effective migration of these legacy systems to a modern cloud architecture, he added.
Motive Ventures
Motive Ventures, the early-stage investment arm of Motive Partners, specializes in investing in fintech startups in North America and Europe. So far, it has backed over 40 firms.
Motive Partners, founded in 2016 by Managing Partner Rob Heyvaert, has raised over $5.5 billion from investors. Heyvaert started his first company, Cimad Consultants, at age 24 and built its capital-markets settlement engine before selling the business to IBM.
