Scout InsurTech Interview with b atomic

B atomic is an insurtech company helping independent agents leverage their data to craft an unforgettable customer experience. Michael Fiedel sat with Founder, Seth Zaremba, to learn more about how b atomic is impacting the industry.

What is b atomic’s client focus?

“Our client focus is insurance agents and brokers.”

What does your product do?

“The neon platform is a system of engagement that works with AMS and user data to accelerate sales, streamline service and deliver third-party services, insurtech and carrier API into agency workflows, creating industry best agency margins.”

How much capital have you raised?

“We’ve raised a little less than $5 million.”

Was the company born from within or outside the industry?

“We are industry insiders trying to help improve things”

What growth metrics have you accomplished over the last 12 months?

“Over the last year, we’ve added a very important component to neon analytics and CRM. The neon Marketplace grew customer base by 30 percent and tripled our revenue.”

Within your domain, what’s the current challenge that the industry is facing?

“Independent insurance agents and brokers are not scaling very well these days. If you look at the distribution of agents by size, close to 90 percent of the market caps out at under 1.5 million in revenue. Why is that? Well, they're running on 15 different systems which weren't built to go together. There's no standard on process, and there's zero connectivity when it comes to their customers, key insurtech partners and even their carrier partners.

The neon platform solves those problems by connecting legacy systems into standardized insurance processes that accelerate the performance of sales that economize and systematize the service processes and deliver solutions to that. Running on 15 systems isn't working anymore. We reduce the number of systems and turn them into simple workflows and processes that are repeatable. Then we bring in the solutions they need which can include data, insurtech, partners, carriers and third-party services all of which lower the cost per transaction. This is important because the margins aren't sustainable with all these systems, so we can take an independent agency or broker of any size and increase their margins by 20 percent.”

How does b atomic take a unique approach to providing value?

“We found an eight to 10 billion TAM in the industry that's never been touched before. It’s crazy to think that something that large, repeatable and expensive in the industry has never been touched. When we talk about distribution for the independent channel, we talk about the number of agencies, people or the volume being moved, but all of that comes down to what people do.

We now know from our data that somewhere between eight and 10 billion times a year, insurance brokers repeat 27 processes. Our uniqueness is we've taken those things and decided to scale them. They're the most cumbersome from a customer-experience standpoint, and they're the greatest opportunity for a carrier ROI connecting into those processes and reducing their cost.”

What inspired the team to start the company?

“My background is exclusively in the insurance space. In the early 2000s, a group of partners and I started one of the first aggregators, looking at how to aggregate and where the economy scales. Back then it was around premium, but that gave us a deep dive into how to take hundreds of agencies, make them profitable and extract revenue from that. Then I opened up a retail-insurance agency and learned everything about what carriers, agents and customers don't do for each other.

There was a problem where customers could always leave and probably lower their rates. Carriers can always increase rates if the market gets tough, but all the inefficiencies and expectations of both of those fall on the independent broker who remains unchanged. b atomic is the company that developed neon, the platform that connects customer, broker, agent and carrier in a common transaction, reducing costs and improving experience.”

Can you share any goals for the next 12 months and how you expect to achieve them?

“We figured out who we are and where we fit in the insurance channel, which for a startup is maddening. It's like pushing a rope; sometimes it seems impossible, and we did it during the hardest times. We've been bookended by two of the biggest and hardest cycles this industry has ever seen, a pandemic and high interest rates. In the middle of all that, we somehow survived and found our product-market fit.

What's next for us? We're going to close our next round this summer, and then our goal is to add 300 agencies to our platform. That gets us beyond profitable and into a significant revenue stream, allowing us to start going after scaled solutions between carriers, insurtechs and brokers at scale.”