Liberate, an artificial intelligence startup that automates insurance operations, raised $50 million in a round led by Battery Ventures because it looks to scale agent deployments to carriers and agencies around the world.
The equity round values the three-year-old startup at $300 million post-funding, with participation from recent investor Canapi Ventures and returning backers Redpoint Ventures, Eclipse and Commerce Ventures.
The insurance industry is going through a difficult period due to rising operating costs, limitations of existing systems and rising customer expectations. In the non-life segment in particular, global premium growth is forecast to slow by 2026 due to increased competition, weaker rate dynamics and recent cost pressures, including tariffs, per latest report by Deloitte. While some carriers have experimented with artificial intelligence, many early efforts have stalled due to data fragmentation and inflexible workflows. This is now changing as insurers move towards full-scale AI adoption – embedding it at the core of their operations moderately than layering it on top. Release steps in to face this variation.
Founded in 2022, the San Francisco-based startup creates AI systems for property and casualty insurers, focusing on sales, service and claims. On the front end, an AI voice assistant, Nicole, handles incoming and outgoing calls to help sell policies or respond to service requests. Behind the scenes, a network of reasoning-based AI agents connect to insurers’ existing systems, gathering context and generating responses provided by Nicole – all without human intervention.
Liberate’s AI agents are built to complete end-to-end tasks – not only answering queries or escalating tickets. These include pricing rules, claims processing and confirmation updates, and other routine functions.
Agents also can operate via SMS and email, enabling insurers to interact with customers across a number of channels while automating more of their day by day workflows.
“Insurance companies want to grow, but they can’t do it,” Liberate co-founder and CEO Amrish Singh (pictured above, center) said in an interview. “It’s the status quo where there is opportunity.”
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Singh co-founded Liberate after nearly 4 years at Metromile, an auto insurance company owned by Lemonade, where he handled each back-office operations and technology. He teamed up with Ryan Eldridge, vice chairman of engineering at Liberate and former Metromile executive, and Jason St. Pierre, the company’s CEO, who previously held positions at Twitter, Google and Verily, Alphabet’s life sciences division.
Liberate’s AI systems have helped increase sales by an average of 15% and reduce costs by 23%, Singh told TechCrunch, adding that the startup currently has greater than 60 customers and is focused on the top 100 carriers and agencies that collectively represent 70% to 80% of the U.S. property and casualty insurance market.
The technology uses reinforcement learning tailored to long, regulated insurance conversations. The startup says every interaction is audited and includes human-in-the-loop safeguards to meet compliance requirements.
Singh said Liberate’s automation volume has grown from 10,000 per 30 days to 1.3 million automated solutions over the last 12 months. These include direct customer interactions via voice AI, in addition to back-end tasks handled by AI agents integrated with carriers’ core systems.
Because AI systems can still make mistakes and are not foolproof, Liberate uses an internal tool called Supervisor to monitor all interactions between its agents and customers. The software flags problems or anomalies and escalates to the human when the AI’s response could also be incorrect, Singh said.
“The advantage of serving just one industry, and within serving only three specific use cases, is that you can place a lot more railings,” the executive noted.
Without disclosing the names of its clients, Liberate said its agents reduced its response time to hurricane claims from 30 hours to 30 seconds.
AI agents enable 24/7 sales, so customers should purchase insurance even at midnight or early morning – hours when human agents are not typically available, Singh said.
Prior to this round, Liberate raised $15 million in Series A final 12 months. The AI-powered omnichannel experience and the ability to fully automate tasks through integration with existing systems were key aspects that attracted investors to support the company on a larger scale.
“Mapping the process, modeling it, and making sure all the system connections are in place, well-tested, and properly designed to get the job done, not just communicate, is what Liberate does,” Marcus Ryu, general partner at Battery Ventures, told TechCrunch.
Ryu, who previously worked with property and casualty insurers at Guidewire Software, focuses on enterprise software, fintech and insurtech investments at Battery Ventures. Joins the board of Liberate.
The Series B funding will probably be used to expand Liberate’s reasoning capabilities and support broader adoption among insurers. The startup has raised $72 million so far and currently employs roughly 50 people.