Our Partnership with Summit
Summit is modernizing the $18 Billion CAD commercial insurance market at a breathtaking pace.
We’re excited to finally announce our partnership and investment in Summit: a commercial insurance solutions provider that works with businesses to provide custom coverage and brokerages to develop unique software applications. Summit is creating the brokerage platform of the future by applying technology to automate the procurement of commercial insurance across a multitude of client verticals. Uniquely, the Company is now taking its technology stack to others and powering the work of other brokerages. Harvest was the first institutional investor in Summit and joined the Company’s most recent financing round with IA Capital.
Worth close to $18 Billion CAD and with M&A deal activity increasing by 60% in just one year (from 2022–2023), the commercial insurance market is now staring down the largest change opportunity since the end of World War II and the proliferation of independent brokerages.
And yet, disruption in the commercial insurance space is not as obvious for a few key structural reasons.
First, policies often require an extreme level of customization as the perils of each business, construction project, or even, say, a film shoot are extraordinarily varied. This challenges how far and how fast embedded solutions may work as the space requires a more consultative approach.
Second, close to 70% of commercial insurance policies are mandated by either regulation or business contract. Given varied party interests, this ensures longer binding and contracting time periods than more standardized P&C policies.
Summit is building into both of these long established marketplace traits and creating a new breakthrough product. Summit is placing brokers first through the deployment of advanced technology, powered by Generative AI, to augment the roles of humans and automate many tedious day to day work tasks. The Company hopes to eventually automate most administrative work that plagues margin accretion in the space.
Second, Summit is turning the multi-stakeholder model of insurance contracting on its head and into an advantage. Summit’s software understands the interdependent needs of customers in the commercial insurance space as the requirements of one customer often trigger changes in those for another; as risks are often inter-related. Summit’s software intends to automate inter-related policy dependencies, turn it into a waterfall effect, and get customers to sign up for even more insurance.
Summit’s team is amongst the best we’ve ever seen. Led by Founders Joshua Pillsbury and Davis Gilbert, the team iterated towards product market fit with a sales led strategy first and then proceeded to build technology on top of significant demand; both on the customer and brokerage side.
We are excited to take this journey with Summit and watch as they transform one of the most complex but rewarding opportunities we’ve ever seen.
