Liberate has raised $50 million in new funding at a post-money valuation of $300 million, a wager from investors that agentic AI can finally untangle the morass that is insurance back offices. Battery Ventures led the funding with participation from Canapi Ventures and existing investors Redpoint Ventures, Eclipse and Commerce Ventures as the company further accelerates deployments across property and casualty carriers and agencies.
The all-equity round brings total funding to $72 million for the three-year-old company and comes just two weeks after it had pared down its staff of about 50 employees. A partner at Battery Ventures who used to work for Guidewire Software is joining Liberate’s board, suggesting that the company will be making a more concerted effort to plug into core systems running policy administration, billing and claims.
The Importance Of Back-Office Automation In Insurance
Insurance is very much a game of margins, and operational drag remains an ongoing headwind. Data provided by APCIA and Verisk indicated that the U.S. P&C combined ratio exceeded 103 in 2023, highlighting significant underwriting losses and pressure building on expenses. In terms of growth potential, the latest outlook from Deloitte forecasts that it’s going to be a bit of a slow burn in non-life premiums through 2026 as competition heats up and rate momentum slows. Decision time for carriers remains ensuring efficiency gains by sweating the back office, but with more customer sizzle on it.
Many of these early AI pilots in insurance never took off because they stacked next to legacy workflows instead of integrating into them. Data silos, policy-specific rules and long regulated interactions make simple chatbots or scripts fragile. The shift now is to “agentic” automation — that’s AI which can think across systems, act, and close loops on multi-step tasks — but combined with auditable controls that check the box for regulators and internal risk teams.
How Liberate’s Agents Work Across P&C Insurance Workflows
Founded in 2022 and based in San Francisco, it focuses on building AI for P&C insurance companies across sales, service and claims. At the front line is its voice assistant, Nicole, which processes inbound and outbound phone calls to quote policies, take service requests and walk through claims. Under the covers, logic-based agents interact with carriers’ legacy systems — frequently platforms such as Guidewire or Duck Creek — to pull in context, perform updates and produce compliant content for Nicole to deliver instantly.
Unlike most other “copilot” tools, which draft replies and hand them back to humans to send, Liberate’s agents are meant for end-to-end handling: They can bind a quote, file and triage a claim, or process an endorsement without human help – when confidence is high. The same capabilities work across SMS and email, enabling insurers to achieve omnichannel coverage without needing additional staffing.
The company says that its models are designed to be fine-tuned for long, monitored conversations, and that they have auditable logs and human-in-the-loop checks. An additional internal oversight layer, Supervisor, scrutinizes every interaction, flags anomalies and funnels unsettled cases back to human adjusters or agents. Liberate says that over the past year it has scaled from tens of thousands a month of automations to more than a million fully resolved tasks monthly, including in one hurricane scenario where claim response time dropped from approximately 30 hours to around 30 seconds.
The selling point is the always-on capacity. With 24/7 sales and service, carriers can bind policies during non-peak hours and deflect routine calls — such as for ID cards, deductible questions or payment updates — to free licensed staff to do more complex and higher-value tasks. McKinsey and other industry researchers have predicted that automation can increase productivity on core insurance activities by double-digit percentages, particularly in claims and customer service.
Investor View And The Competitive Landscape In Insurance
Battery Ventures and Canapi Ventures are echoing a wider insurtech trend: shifting from document-level AI to owning the workflow. Though companies such as Hyperscience and Sprout.ai focus on document extraction, and Shift Technology tackles fraud analytics, Liberate is focusing on the orchestration layer — the logic that stitches documents, core systems and customer interactions together into a finished outcome.
That approach is going to pit Liberate against the of-the-moment platforms that incumbents are currently running their automation programs through — as well as homegrown automation systems many carriers already use. Core system vendors continue to build out their AI add-ons, while big carriers have managed massive data science teams. The third pillar separating Liberate from existing solutions is the speed with which it can be installed, its ability to cover a wider range of channels, and its quantifiable business lift:
- Shorter cycle times
- Increased first-contact resolution
- Reduced cost per claim or policy change
Compliance, Auditability, And The Risk Of The Model
Regulators are sharpening their expectations for AI in insurance. The NAIC AI Principles prioritize fairness, accountability and transparency; meanwhile, Colorado’s rules governing third-party consumer data and models, alongside guidance from New York’s Department of Financial Services, further raise the bar on bias monitoring and explainability. In this environment, carriers are demanding that systems maintain an audit trail, enable consented call recording and offer deterministic guardrails around pricing and coverage decisions.
“Every action our agents perform is logged and reviewable, with backtesting bound by policy rules and state space constraints,” Liberate says. Human escalation on low-confidence cases goes toward lowering error rates, the company says, and it positions its narrow focus — three primary use cases within P&C — as a way to harden the safety rails compared with general-purpose assistants.
What’s Next For Liberate After Its $50 Million Raise
The Series B will be used to deepen reasoning capabilities, increase integration with carrier systems and expand omnichannel coverage. Short-term priorities include scaling deployments across more lines and geographies, delivering on voice latency and accuracy improvements, and incorporating controls for enterprise risk, such as granular permission controls and red-teaming for model behavior.
The bar for competition is getting higher, but so is the level of urgency. With premium growth softening and expense ratios biting, carriers are starting to shift out of pilot purgatory to production AI in the core. If Liberate can regularly transform difficult workflows into proper auditable end-to-end automations, then this is one of the few AI tech vendors that will start to drive insurance P&L in a meaningful way.
