Honeycomb Insurance raises $40M to expand AI-powered commercial property insurance platform

Insurance has become one of the toughest businesses to scale in recent years. Rising catastrophe losses, volatile property markets, and tighter underwriting standards have pushed many carriers to pull back coverage or raise prices. Yet one startup is moving in the opposite direction.

Honeycomb Insurance, a digital insurer focused on apartment buildings and condominium associations, has raised $40 million in new funding to expand its footprint and double down on the AI technology behind its underwriting platform.

The round was led by Zeev Ventures, with participation from existing investor Ibex Investors and new backers Peakline, Alpha Partners, Meitar Partners, Practical VC, and former San Francisco 49ers NFL champion Harris Barton. The new investment brings Honeycomb’s total funding to $95 million.

The fresh capital arrives after a year of strong growth for the Chicago-based company. Honeycomb said it exited 2025 with $275 million in Gross Written Premium, expanded into new states, broadened its product offerings, and increased the total insured value managed through its platform.

Property insurance has long relied on manual reviews, broad risk categories, and physical inspections. Honeycomb’s pitch is that advances in data and AI make it possible to evaluate individual buildings with much greater precision.

Why Honeycomb is betting on AI to rethink commercial property insurance

Instead of relying heavily on generalized underwriting guidelines, the insurTech startup collects hundreds of structured and unstructured data points tied to each property. That information includes geospatial and environmental datasets, building characteristics, historical performance records, high-resolution imagery, and other risk indicators. Proprietary AI models then analyze the data to assess building-level risk.

The goal is to identify quality properties that may be overlooked by traditional carriers and offer coverage based on actual risk rather than broad assumptions.

“We are building Honeycomb to be the category leader in commercial real estate insurance,” said Itai Ben-Zaken, co-founder and CEO of Honeycomb Insurance. “We didn’t add AI to a legacy offering. Our platform is centered on proprietary data and AI models to underwrite each property individually, with competitive and fair pricing and terms. This funding accelerates our expansion into new states and new product lines as we move toward that goal.”

The approach appears to be gaining traction. Honeycomb now operates across more than 20 states and says its admitted and non-admitted insurance products cover more than 65% of the U.S. population. The company manages over $100 billion in insured assets.

For investors, the appeal extends beyond growth. Insurance startups often face pressure to choose between expansion and profitability. Honeycomb argues that its technology-driven underwriting system enables it to scale without sacrificing financial discipline, helping it manage exposure, catastrophe concentration, and pricing decisions more accurately.

“Honeycomb has built something I rarely see – an insurance company that has scaled rapidly while maintaining a lean operation,” said Oren Zeev, Founding Partner of Zeev Ventures. “That combination is exceptionally rare in insurance, and it reflects the strength of both the team and the technology. The commercial property market is massive, underserved by legacy carriers, and Honeycomb is uniquely positioned to become a category leader.”

From $275M in premiums to nationwide expansion

The funding comes at a time when AI adoption is spreading well beyond chatbots and productivity tools. Insurers are increasingly turning to machine learning models, alternative data sources, and computer vision systems to improve risk assessment and claims management. Honeycomb represents a growing group of insurance startups built around those capabilities from day one rather than layering them onto older systems.

That distinction could prove valuable as commercial property owners face growing challenges tied to climate risk, rising construction costs, and shifting market conditions. The ability to evaluate risk on a building-by-building basis is becoming more important than ever.

For Honeycomb, the next phase is straightforward: expand into additional markets, introduce new insurance products, and keep building an underwriting platform that aims to make property insurance more data-driven than it has traditionally been.