Ledger raises $75m to accelerate ILS / data revenues & grow team
Ledger Investing, the insurance technology (insurtech) and insurance-linked securities (ILS) focused company, has announced a successful new Series B capital raise that has secured it $75 million in growth capital.
The Series B funding round was led by investor WestCap, while Teachers’ Venture Growth and Intact Ventures also participated, and previous investors SignalFire, MassMutual Ventures, Allegis Capital, and Accel all doubled-down with a further investment into the Ledger Investing business.
The newly raised funding is set to be ploughed into an expansion of Ledger Investing’s ILS marketplace, its data infrastructure service products, and ILS asset management offerings.
Ledger Investing hopes that the investment can be put to work to accelerate revenue growth across its insurance-linked security (ILS) brokerage and ILS asset management businesses, to develop and launch new data infrastructure service products, and to dramatically expand its team with the hiring of over 200 employees.
That is a significant expansion of the Ledger Investing team, which should see the company far better resourced and with a range of options to expand the business.
Ledger Investing has continued to make steady progress in recent weeks, with its premiums of insurance or reinsurance business placed into the capital markets now having reached over $471 million, according to its tracker.
Ledger continues to target areas of risk such as casualty lines and last year launched the first dedicated casualty ILS fund, named Nanorock, through which it aims to create a new growth segment in insurance-linked investments.
But it also has an ambition to expand into more areas of insurance and reinsurance, feeling its technology and approach to matching risk with institutional capital can help in a broader cross-section of the market.
The company also launched an ILS fund management unit last year, named Ledger ILS Managers LLC, which allows it to also marshal capital to deals more efficiently and manager external capital for investors.
Ledger feels it can hit $1 billion of premium placed into the capital markets by the end of this year, with its growth set to accelerate and this new fund raise set to assist.
On its desire to expand, the company said, “As Ledger grows, the marketplace will serve virtually all types of insurance risks and capital, encompassing traditional reinsurers, institutional investors, wealth managers, and accredited retail investors.”
“We are well on our way to creating a trillion dollar asset class and changing the fundamentals of how insurance risk has connected to capital since the dawn of the (re)insurance industry,” Samir Shah, CEO of Ledger Investing commented.
“We have built sophisticated risk and capital infrastructure to address the industry’s structural inability to provide insightful and reliable information to capital providers. Our technology benefits all stakeholders by bringing greater efficiency and transparency to every transaction.”
Ledger Investing is focused on bringing investors relatively uncorrelated returns from the insurance and reinsurance market, while delivering more efficient capital to re/insurers.
The company feels frictional costs are high in the marketplace and as a registered broker/dealer has an opportunity to take cedents directly to the capital markets, with a stated mission “to transform the financing structure of the entire insurance industry.”
“Ledger Investing is bringing critical transparency and automation to risk transfer,” Jeff Mullen, Partner at WestCap, who will be joining the Ledger Investing Board of Directors said. “With its industry-first open data platform, powerful analytics and objective pricing models, Ledger is uniquely positioned to drive transformational change by creating new capital opportunities for MGAs and insurers, as well as an entirely new asset class for many investors.”
