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

Liberate, an AI startup automating insurance operations, has raised $50 million in a round led by Battery Ventures as it looks to scale its agentic deployments across 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 navigating a difficult stretch, with rising operational costs, legacy system constraints, and increasing customer expectations. Specifically in the non-life segment, global premium growth is projected to slow through 2026, driven by heightened competition, weaker rate momentum, and new cost pressures, including tariffs, per a recent report by Deloitte. While some carriers experimented with AI, many early efforts stalled due to fragmented data and inflexible workflows. That is now changing, as insurers shift toward full-scale AI adoption — embedding it into the core of their operations rather than layering it on top. Liberate is stepping in to meet this shift head-on.

Founded in 2022, the San Francisco-based startup builds AI systems for property and casualty insurers, focusing on sales, service, and claims. At the front end, its voice AI assistant, Nicole, handles inbound and outbound calls to help sell policies or respond to service requests. Behind the scenes, a network of reasoning-based AI agents connects to insurers’ existing systems, gathering context and generating responses that Nicole delivers — all without human intervention.

Liberate’s AI agents are built to complete end-to-end tasks — not just respond to queries or escalate tickets. These include quoting policies, processing claims, and updating endorsements, among other routine functions.

The agents can also operate over SMS and email, allowing insurers to interact with customers across different channels while automating more of their day-to-day workflows.

“Insurance companies want to grow, but they’re not able to do so,” Liberate co-founder and CEO Amrish Singh (pictured above, center) said in an interview. “It’s the status quo where the opportunity is.”

Singh co-founded Liberate after nearly four years at Metromile, the car insurance firm owned by Lemonade, where he worked across both back-office operations and technology. He teamed up with Ryan Eldridge, Liberate’s VP of engineering and also a former Metromile executive, and Jason St. Pierre, the company’s CPO, who previously held roles at Twitter, Google, and Verily, Alphabet’s life sciences arm.

Liberate’s AI systems have helped increase sales by an average of 15% and cut costs by 23%, Singh told TechCrunch, adding that the startup now has over 60 customers and focuses on 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 for long, regulated insurance conversations. Each 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 stated. These include direct customer interactions via its voice AI, as well as back-office tasks handled by AI agents integrated into carriers’ core systems.

Since AI systems can still make mistakes and are not foolproof yet, Liberate uses an internal tool called Supervisor to monitor all interactions between its agents and customers. The software flags issues or anomalies and escalates to a human when the AI’s response may be off-track, Singh said.

“The advantage of servicing only one industry, and within that servicing only three specific use cases, is that you can put a lot more guardrails in place,” the executive noted.

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

The AI agents enable 24/7 sales operations, allowing customers to buy insurance even at midnight or early in the morning — times when human agents typically are not available, Singh said.

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

“Mapping the process, modeling it, and making sure that all the systems connections are in place, well tested, and appropriately designed so that you can complete the task, not just communicate, is what Liberate is doing,” Marcus Ryu, a 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 is joining Liberate’s board.

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