Loadsure is making waves in the cargo insurance world. The insurtech managing general agent (MGA) has delivered the industry’s first transactional cargo insurance platform and automated claims process, powered by artificial intelligence (AI).
With the need for instant, on-demand risk management abundantly clear in today’s just-in-time supply chain, Loadsure’s embedded cargo coverage has caught the eye of investors. The MGA closed its $11 million Series A funding round in March 2022, led by MMC Ventures, Insurtech Gateway, and Crowley, a global maritime, energy, and logistics company.
Loadsure CEO Johnny McCord (pictured) commented at the time: “We’re delighted to partner with MMC Ventures, Insurtech Gateway, and Crowley in driving meaningful change for the freight industry, especially now as it continues to wrestle with supply chain disruption and pandemic uncertainty. With this infusion of capital, we’ll make the strategic hires necessary to evolve our human-centric technology and make end-to-end risk management instantly available to every business.”
Armed with fresh capital, Loadsure hopes to grow its team from 27 to around 70 members over the next 12 months, according to McCord. He added: “We’re also rolling out a number of new freight and cargo-related products within our platform. We're very excited about that.”
It has been a busy few months for the MGA since closing its Series A funding round. In May 2022, Loadsure announced a new distribution partnership with Burns & Wilcox, whereby the wholesale broker and MGA will offer Loadsure’s AI-powered trip transit insurance coverage to independent brokers across Canada.
Loadsure also launched Cargo Plus in May, a new smart annual cargo product, sold as a pay-as-you-go policy, with no minimum premium required. Cargo Plus will be offered worldwide and include all-risk coverage for goods and merchandise in transit, with limits of up to $10 million in international and $5 million in US domestic conveyance.
“We’re delighted with the adoption of Loadsure products from the wholesale and retail market, and we're continuing to grow that,” McCord told Insurance Business. “We want to be in the hands of every single agent or broker that services freight business, so that we can make their lives more efficient and enable them to focus on client relationships and complex risks.
“Loadsure is a tool for the market; we're not here to disrupt the market. We don't believe - and I certainly don't believe - that any tech company can disrupt the insurance intermediary chain. It just won’t happen. Agents and brokers are the trusted advisors of the end-customers. What we can do with technology is help them to be more efficient, make the products more agile and dynamic, and address the emerging risks that are ever-occurring.”
The traditional insurance market hasn’t been historically “savvy” when it comes to data and technology, according to McCord. While the market is rich in data, McCord believes insurers have struggled to “find value” and “be productive” with it. This is partly due to legacy and size impeding nimble innovation – shackles that insurtech Loadsure, founded in 2018, has never had to contend with.
“Being a digital-first company, we’ve enabled ourselves to build our technology from the ground up. Our technology and our algorithms have not evolved from any legacy systems; they’ve been built using the latest technology, which enables us to be very sophisticated in the way we utilize data,” McCord explained. “We analyze every bit of data that comes in to see if it has an impact, and we're constantly making hundreds and hundreds of different models to see the implications of the data.
“There’s a common misconception around the use of data and technology that things happen instantaneously. That’s not how it works. There’s a journey that you have to go on, and there’s education that the technology has to go through, so it’s not like switching on a switch. It requires a lot of investment of both time and money to continuously review this data to make the algorithms smarter and more dependable.
“Loadsure is on this journey. We’re by no means the finished article. We’re keeping our data pipelines very active to enable us to continuously review our ratings. We believe that we have built and continue to build one of the most sophisticated rating algorithms in the cargo and freight insurance industry.”
