Liberate bags $50M at $300M valuation to bring AI deeper into insurance back offices

Liberate, an AI startup that automates insurance operations, has raised $50 million in a round led by Battery Ventures as it looks to scale its agentic deployment with carriers and agencies globally.

The all-equity round values ​​the three-year-old startup at $300 million post-money, with participation from new investor Canapi Ventures and returning backers Redpoint Ventures, Eclipse and Commerce Ventures.

The insurance industry has been through a difficult trajectory, with rising operational costs, limitations of existing systems and increasing customer expectations. Specifically in the non-life insurance segment, global premium growth is expected to slow through 2026, driven by increased competition, weaker interest rate momentum and new cost pressures, including rates. recent report from Deloitte. While some carriers experimented with AI, many early efforts stalled due to fragmented data and inflexible workflows. That is now changing, as insurers move to fully adopt AI – embedding it into the core of their operations rather than layering it on top. Liberate steps in to meet this shift head-on.

Founded in 2022, the San Francisco-based startup builds AI systems for property and casualty insurers, with a focus on sales, service and claims. On the front end, voice AI assistant Nicole handles incoming and outgoing calls to sell policies or respond to service requests. Behind the scenes, a network of reasoning-based AI agents connects to insurers’ existing systems, gathers context, and generates responses that Nicole delivers – all without human intervention.

Liberate’s AI agents are built to perform end-to-end tasks – not just respond to queries or escalate tickets. These include quoting policies, processing claims, and updating approvals.

The agents can also work via SMS and email, allowing insurers to communicate with customers across channels while automating more of their daily workflows.

“Insurance companies want to grow, but they can’t,” said Amrish Singh, co-founder and CEO of Liberate (pictured above, center) in an interview. “It’s the status quo where the opportunity lies.”

Singh co-founded Liberate after nearly four years at Metromile, Lemonade’s auto insurance company, where he worked in both the back office and technology areas. He worked with Ryan Eldridge, Liberate’s vice president of engineering and a former director of Metromile, and Jason St. Pierre, the company’s CPO, who previously held positions at Twitter, Google and Verily, Alphabet’s life sciences unit.

Liberate’s AI systems have helped increase revenue by an average of 15% and reduce costs by 23%, Singh told TechCrunch. He added that the startup now has more than 60 customers and is targeting the top 100 carriers and agencies, which together represent 70% to 80% of the U.S. property and casualty insurance market.

The technology uses reinforcement learning tailored to long, regulated insurance conversations. Every interaction is auditable and includes human-in-the-loop safeguards to meet compliance requirements, the startup said.

Over the past year, Liberate has scaled from 10,000 monthly automations to 1.3 million automated resolutions, Singh said. These include direct customer interactions through the voice AI, as well as back-office tasks handled by AI agents integrated into carriers’ core systems.

Because AI systems can still make mistakes and are not foolproof yetLiberate uses an internal tool called Supervisor to monitor all interactions between agents and customers. The software identifies problems or anomalies and escalates to a human when the AI’s response may be off track, Singh said.

“The advantage of serving just one sector, and within that sector only three specific use cases, is that you can put in place many more guardrails,” the executive noted.

Without disclosing the names of its clients, Liberate said that with the help of its agents, response time to hurricane claims dropped from 30 hours to 30 seconds.

The AI ​​agents enable 24/7 sales operations, allowing customers to purchase insurance even at midnight or early in the morning — times when human agents are typically unavailable, Singh said.

Before this round, Liberate raised a $15 million Series A last year. Its AI-powered omnichannel experience and ability to fully automate tasks by integrating into existing systems were key factors that led investors to back the company on a larger scale.

“Mapping the process, modeling it, and making sure all the system connections are in place, properly tested, and properly designed so you can complete the task and not just communicate is what Liberate does,” Marcus Ryu, general partner at Battery Ventures, told TechCrunch.

Ryu, who previously worked with property and casualty insurers at Guidewire Software, focuses on enterprise software, fintech and insurtech investments at Battery Ventures. He joins the board of Liberate.

The Series B funding will be used to expand Liberate’s reasoning capabilities and support broader deployment with insurers. The startup has raised $72 million to date and currently employs around 50 people.