Walnut, an innovative company focused on the insurance distribution industry, announced the successful closing of its latest funding round at $4.6 million. The funding round was led by NAventures (the corporate venture capital arm of National Bank of Canada), with participation from TELUS Global Ventures, Diagram Ventures, Portage and Highline Beta.
The funding will be used to expand Walnut's groundbreaking embedded insurance technology platform for insurers, brokers and enterprise companies looking to participate in the future of insurance distribution. The funding, provided by leading Canadian investors, marks a major milestone for Walnut as it accelerates its efforts to modernize and streamline insurance distribution.
Diagram has recently expanded its strategy beyond its well-known venture studio model to include external investments, and Walnut is one of the first few companies of its kind in Diagram's portfolio, highlighting Diagram's confidence in the team's potential to revolutionize the insurance industry.
Walnut's approach to insurance distribution leverages advanced technology and strategic partnerships to create a sustainable and efficient business model, and by embedding insurance products directly into corporate and financial institutions' products and platforms, Walnut eliminates significant marketing costs and drives insurance sales through partner-driven channels.
This strategy supports insurers' more sustainable distribution strategies and ensures that consumers receive customized insurance products when and where they need them.
Walnut's platform enables partners to create quotes and onboard customers in real time for nearly any insurance product through a co-branded consumer experience, an advisor-driven process, or headless via APIs. Walnut offers flexible and efficient solutions to integrate insurance into various digital ecosystems within 30-90 days, instead of the typical years that it would take. This approach ensures seamless multi-channel delivery, improving customer experience and resulting in effective product delivery.
For insurers and brokers, Walnut's platform delivers significant benefits, including profit sharing on front-loading marketing spend, improved risk management and unlocking untapped channels. Its partners benefit from increased ARPU (average revenue per user), stronger customer relationships and reduced churn. For consumers, Walnut's solution reduces buying friction and ensures coverage is received at the right time through a data-driven process and an integrated branded experience.
In the current economic climate, where loan defaults and financial instability are on the rise, Walnut's focus on loan and debt protection products is timely, and the company supports a number of insurance products. These products are also designed to protect consumers against loss of income, providing support in uncertain times.
Walnut plans to use the funding to strengthen its technology platform for insurers and brokers, expand its engineering team, form new partnerships and is poised to enter new markets capitalizing on the significant opportunity to effectively deploy replicable embedded insurance solutions.
Important Quotes:
“The insurance industry has not yet completed its digital transformation, with many insurers and brokers still operating in traditional, non-digital ways. We aim to leapfrog traditional digital transformation and support modern, API-enabled, embedded delivery strategies.”
“Our Embedded Insurance Platform captures distribution, supports insurers and brokers with an embedded-first infrastructure, and delivers products to customers in a compliant manner. This funding will enable us to extend our technology stack, scale our operations, and deliver innovative insurance solutions to both insurers and enterprises looking to generate new revenue streams.”
Adrian Niblock, CPO and co-founder of Walnut
“Walnut's unique approach to embedded insurance distribution aligns with our vision of supporting transformative technologies that have the potential to drive significant change in the industry. Over the past two years, in addition to Diagram's previous venture builder activity, we have made a number of investments in high quality external pre-seed to Series A companies. This complements what we have done to date, and we are excited to support a broad group of companies like Walnut in our ecosystem,” added François.
François Lafortune, CEO of Diagram Ventures
“We are proud to support Walnut in their next phase of growth. Our continued investment and partnership reflects our confidence in their vision and ability to execute.”
James Povitz, Principal at NAventures
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