Herald

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Founders: Matthew Antoszyk & Duncan Crystal
Founding: 2021
Mission: Make it easier for developers to digitally connect their software to the insurance ecosystem
Employees: 18 & 1/3 Local
Workplace: Hybrid
Stage & Capital Raised: Seed & $8M raised
Investors: Lightspeed Venture Partners, Afore Capital & Underscore VC with assorted Angels
Key Customers: At-Bay, CFC, Vouch, BindHQ, CNA
Glassdoor Rating: N/A
Valuation (estimated): <$50M
^ this is a useless number. There is no tangible valuation until the business is sold or goes public. Don’t forget it!

Herald is “the easiest API for commercial insurance”. Founded in 2021 by Matthew Antoszyk & Duncan Crystal, these Co-Founders began their startup journey built on the infrastructure of a 20 year friendship. They met as kids at summer camp, a slightly more blissful environment than the crucible of early stage startups. If you want to know what someone’s really like there’s no better way than roasting marshmallows together. Oh and by the way CTO Jacob Barnett went to the same camp too! Maybe someone should turn this camp into an accelerator.. Anyway, back to Herald.

Matt & Duncan more recently worked together at digital insurance company At-Bay, in Mountain View, right down the street from Google. Life eventually took both of them back to the Boston area, Duncan with At-Bay remotely and Matt to attend HBS. They knew they wanted to start a company together but took some time to explore the problem space.

At-Bay was one of the first digital insurance companies who sold cyber insurance. Matt came to At-Bay via McKinsey where he was working to build out their cybersecurity practice. When he switched over to insurtech, he spent 6 months building cyber tools and then 3 years building the technology to make all their integrations work properly. This was where the vision for Herald began.

Commercial insurance, insurance for businesses, is sold almost entirely through brokers. Those brokers create their own marketplaces to buy and sell specific policies from various carriers. So as the digital transformation is upon us, you could build something like “KAYAK for insurance”. It would take a slick UI and then a bunch of API integrations to connect to all the carriers in order to properly size your marketplace. There’s a lot of competition in this space. Think 50 startups each doing 10 API integrations to get to market. API integrations take time to complete. Maintaining API integrations is a borderline nightmare. 

What if you didn’t need to hook up to 50 APIs but could complete a single integration? That’s Herald. Herald is “Stripe for commercial insurance”. They’re an infrastructure company that helps commercial insurance companies forgo the technical cost (and time) of setting up API integrations and maintaining them. The business model is a B2B SaaS offering that also captures transaction costs for the policies or “premium”, in insurance parlance, purchased over their pipes. 

The team spent over a year laying the technical groundwork to make their API marketplace seamless. They have integrated with 20 different carriers across 10 relevant products like general liability, workers comp, business owners policy, cyber insurance, D&O, etc. and have at least 5 options per product line – supporting over 60 total commercial products. Herald has already amassed one of the largest inventories in the space and works with 5 of the top 50 brokerages, providing infrastructure software to digital and legacy commercial insurance businesses alike. 

As the company grows and insurance workflows become further digitized, more infrastructure will be needed to help automate the entire purchase transaction lifecycle. Herald aims to be the infrastructure provider with which commercial insurance companies can build their entire digital workflows around. They’ll help businesses go deeper through the policy lifecycle by helping to handle renewals, policy additions, and coverage increases.

There are always more endpoints too. Herald can help connect carriers to brokers. Carriers to other carriers and brokers to brokers. Their customers are brokers or broker technology providers, whoever is responsible for building workflows.

After dedicating 2022 to building out their infrastructure product, they’re off to the races in 2023. They began generating revenue in the last 6 months and are closing in on a seven figure run rate as they race toward 2024. Carriers are now reaching out to Herald to get integrated into their platform, with a backlog of integrations through the end of the year. Multiple customers and prospects tell them “I’ve been looking for this!”. That’s the type of market pull you search for.

From a team perspective, this is a company born in the pandemic. They’re a mostly remote workplace but are also experimenting with how to bring hybrid work into their cultural flow. The company has a third of their workforce in the Boston area, does quarterly on-sites and has an Analyst team in New York that is in person 2x per week. The Engineering team gets together at least once per year and they’ve stood up most of their initial key functions.

Operators to Know (Locally):

My investigative powers continue to need work so apologies to the Herald team I’m sure I missed some up & coming operators internally

Key Roles To Be Hired:

  • Product Manager
  • Customer Success & Sales roles coming in months ahead!

If I were interviewing here are some questions I’d ask:

  • What are the key company goals for 2023 & the long term vision for the company? 
  • What are the most important roles you’ll be looking to add in 2023?
  • How are you serving your initial customers today as you build out the revenue team?
  • What are the key product & roadmap milestones over the next 6 months?

We’re optimizing for readability here so to learn more about Herald you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team bring more commercial insurance companies into the digital age. All policyholders, providers & commercial marketplaces applaud your efforts. See you around town!

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