Today, we’re excited to announce that Oyster has raised $3.6 million in Seed funding to launch a modern personal insurance platform for seamless point-of-sale and post-purchase experiences.

We’re grateful to be supported by an incredible group of angels and investors, led by New Stack Ventures alongside Global Founders Capital, Conversion Capital, Cambrian Ventures, Kearny Jackson, Valia Ventures, Interlace Ventures, V1 VC, Polymath Capital, Position Ventures, Kevin Mahaffey (Founder of Lookout), Garrett Koehn (President of CRC Insurance), Gokul Rajaram (executive at DoorDash), Eugene Marinelli (Founder of Blend), Joe Schmidt (Partner at a16z), and Tanay Jaipuria (Partner at Wing).

Together, we’re working to build a better customer experience from the ground-up in the world of personal insurance, anchored by a strong belief in the potential of technology.

Insurance doesn’t work for consumers

Over the last two decades, the world has seen a boom in the investment of technology that powers finance. The development and success of entirely new capabilities, like instant stock trading, to new purchasing paradigms, like buy-now-pay-later, teaches us two lessons: (1) across industries, consumer expectations are rising when it comes to the way they interact with everyday facets of their lives; and (2) the successful application of technology can have a transformational impact on both an entire industry and the way consumers interact with that industry.

Today, insurance is one of the remaining financial sectors that has yet to see the same kind of impact from all of the technological advances of the last two decades. Understanding of insurance remains low amongst consumers, every process from discovery to application to claims remains arduously manual and opaque, and incumbents in an inherently risk-averse industry have been unsuccessful in changing the status quo.

For many of our most valuable possessions, a service that protects against theft, damage, and loss is invaluable. However, the decoupling of the insurance-buying journey from the actual purchase of the item drives issues of discoverability, unclear coverages and processes, pricing and underwriting inefficiencies, and higher loss ratios, which all ultimately lead to a poor customer experience and widespread coverage gaps.

Introducing Oyster

Oyster was founded to solve these problems from first principles, bringing innovation to the P&C insurance industry through technology and underwriting.

Oyster’s omni-channel platform allows merchants to offer insurance to their customers at the point-of-sale. With a focus on point-of-sale underwriting, technology, and partnerships with retailers, we’re solving each of these issues while simultaneously helping customer-centric merchants offer better protection to their customers, open new revenue streams, and most importantly, provide a differentiated customer experience in an increasingly competitive market.

The new investment will propel the launch of our point-of-sale insurance platform and expand our merchant partnership network to make personal insurance accessible to more consumers at the point-of-sale. At the same time, we’re ensuring that personal property in any category can be covered by rolling out a comprehensive suite of insurance products that cover bikes, eBikes, jewelry, collectibles, phones, electronics and more.

Retailers such as Bulls Bikes, Jewels by Grace, Zooz Bikes, Bario Neal, Area 13 Ebikes, The New Wheel, and more rely on Oyster to provide a seamless insurance experience both online and in-store for their customers. But the journey for Oyster has just begun. We have a lot of challenging problems to solve, and if we can do so, an immense opportunity to change the way people interact with insurance.

The insurance industry is still in the early innings of digital transformation. As such, we’re accelerating the speed of innovation in order to provide the best-in-class products and services to our customers and partners. If you’re interested in building a future of insurance that is powered by technology and data, reach out to us and share your big ideas.