Insurtech startup Socotra secures $5.5 million Series A to modernize insurance technology and accelerate sales

Socotra, the insurtech startup and creator of the first cloud-native, productized insurance core platform, has secured a $5.5 million Series A funding round to fund further product development and to accelerate sales. The latest round was led by Silicon-Valley based technology investment firm, 8VC. In addition to the funding, Socotra also announced 8VC founding partner, Joe Lonsdale, will join the Socotra board. 8VC joins previous investors Founders Fund, Greenoaks Capital, SciFi VC, SV Angel, Tuesday Capital (formerly CrunchFund) and Vulcan Capital.

Founded in 2014 by Dan Woods, the San Francisco-based Socotra is the next-generation technology platform built to power the fastest growing insurance businesses globally. Socotra is the next-generation technology platform built to power the fastest growing insurance businesses globally. The Socotra Platform is built from the ground-up using the latest technologies to be transparent, reliable, flexible, and secure. Their team comes from world’s best engineering schools and software companies. Socotra’s platform brings the staggering technology infrastructure advances of the last decade to the insurance industry. The result is a new, simplified, radically open, cloud-native core platform that supports underwriting, policy administration, claims, billing, reporting, and much more.

Socotra is the industry’s first cloud-native backend with open configuration and APIs, empowering insurers to deploy powerful backend technology with their own engineering resources. With customers on three continents ranging from startups to Fortune 500 global businesses, Socotra enables carriers to achieve new levels of agility throughout the policy lifecycle (single or multi-line, life or P&C, commercial or retail). Socotra’s agility, flexibility, reliability, and modern design offers carriers lower costs, faster product releases, and easy integration with future technologies.

“8VC’s founding vision is to support big technology leaps for big industries,” said Lonsdale. “Insurance is one of the world’s largest industries, and Socotra has the strongest team I’ve seen in the space and is building an advanced platform to power the future of the industry. We’re excited to be part of the impact Socotra is already beginning to have.”

8VC is a Silicon-Valley based technology investment firm investing in visionary teams and backing industry-transforming companies. The partners have a proven track-record as founders, engineers, and operators of successful companies including Palantir, Addepar and OpenGov, among others. The firm was founded in 2012 and currently manages $2.7bn+ in AUM, investing primarily in smart enterprise platforms, Bio-IT, health-IT, logistics, consumer, real estate and others.

“Insurance executives see plainly that their internal systems haven’t kept up with systems in the outside world. This industry is too big and too important to sit out while the rest of the world advances,” said Dan Woods, CEO, Socotra. “Socotra is now providing the insurance industry with the software it deserves. With 8VC’s help, we can further enrich our platform and serve even more customers.”