Socotra (San Francisco/Austin, Texas), a cloud-native core platform for insurance, has announced its acquisition of Avolanta(Blythewood, S.C.), a software startup offering what a Socotra statement calls the only unified portal purpose-built for the insurance industry. As part of the acquisition, the Avolanta team will join Socotra and Avolanta’s technology will become Socotra Unified Portal.
“Insurers rank agility and speed-to-market as their top priorities,” said Stuart Rose, Strategic Advisor, Aite-Novarica (Boston). “Today we see microservices-based platforms, such as Socotra and Avolanta, that allow insurers to deploy a flexible set of components and always stay up to date. Open ecosystem approaches are providing insurers with the agility they need to create modern products that can satisfy the demands of today’s customers.”
Socotra frames the acquisition news with the observation that insurance companies are struggling to deliver the types of digital user experiences that are now common in other industries. “Many insurance customers are still forced to fill out paper applications with agents and brokers manually entering customer data into outdated web portals,” says Socotra’s statement on the acquisition. “Avolanta enables insurers to solve these issues by seamlessly connecting agents, brokers, and customers with its unified portal.”
Avolanta was founded in 2018 by InsurTech entrepreneur, Chuck Wilson, and insurance veteran, Gavin Dean. With decades of experience in the industry, the founders created Avolanta with the goal of providing insurers a better way to streamline processes and create user experiences.
Socotra describes Avolanta as a cloud-native platform that allows insurers to rapidly innovate and deploy new products with a unified portal. The platform lets agents collaborate with customers through secure, shared online applications to reduce manual entry. As a result, insurers can deliver customized experiences, automate data capture and analytics, and ultimately drive more conversions and revenue, the Socotra statement asserts
“Joining Socotra is an exciting next chapter for Avolanta,” comments Chuck Wilson, CEO and co-founder, Avolanta. “Avolanta’s front-end technology focused on the user experience is the perfect extension to Socotra’s backend policy core. The combined platform will help insurers quickly develop new insurance products with more convenient buying experiences for any distribution channel—whether it’s agent, embedded, or direct-to-consumer. We can’t wait to see how insurers will leverage Socotra to innovate.”
Perfect Complement to Socotra’s Core
“The acquisition of Avolanta is a perfect complement to Socotra’s industry-leading policy core,” said Dan Woods, founder and CEO of Socotra. “Socotra and Avolanta share a mission to modernize the insurance industry with open APIs, true cloud, and off-the-shelf capabilities that accelerate innovation and speed-to-market. Together, we now offer the complete front-to-back platform that moves the insurance industry forward.”
Founded in 2014, Socotra provides core insurance technology that the firm characterizes as the insurance industry’s most open and agile platform powerful enough for today’s innovators. Socotra reports that it added 17 new customers in 202. After raising a $50 million Series C funding round in March 2022, the company is now expanding its platform and ecosystem capabilities, including Socotra Marketplace—which the company describes as the insurance industry’s first no-code app marketplace enabling instant integrations with third-party technology providers.
Socotra pitches itself as enabling insurers to bring innovative products to market with out-of-the-box capabilities or by integrating through open APIs any custom or third-party technology in the insurance ecosystem, such as a proprietary rating engine, a digital frontend experience, or an automated claims solution. Socotra says the combination of Avolanta’s front-end development platform with its own advanced policy core creates the first front-to-back, cloud-native insurance platform for the rapid development of user experiences, underwriting, policy admin, billing, claims, and reporting.
Source: Insurance Innovation Reporter
