Commercial InsurTech Bold Penguin Buys xagent To Expand B2B Range

The commercial InsurTech Bold Penguin is acquiring excess and surplus brokerage tech platform xagent so it can scale service to insurance carriers, brokers and agents, Bold Penguin announced on Thursday (Jan. 2).

xagent will integrate with the Bold Penguin exchange, which couples businesses and agents with commercial insurance quotes. Bold Penguin offers businesses commercial insurance on one comprehensive platform, and allows for the quoting and binding of commercial insurance in hours or minutes instead of weeks.

“We are obsessed with upgrading the commercial insurance ecosystem, helping it evolve to meet the needs of all the players and catch up with the pace of technological innovation,” said Ilya Bodner, founder and CEO of Bold Penguin. “xagent shares this vision and passion; instead of forcing the market to choose between our divided solutions, acquiring xagent gives customers one simple, comprehensive solution to trust.”

This acquisition aligns with Bold Penguin’s mission to advance access to excess and surplus while building out its tech stack. One integration helps bridge the disjointed insurance industry.

Bryan Baird, president and CEO of xagent, said the platform simplifies the process while maintaining “the human connection people still want when buying insurance.”

He added that both xagent and Bold Penguin will collaborate “to solve the same problem: simplifying and accelerating the process to obtain commercial insurance.”

Columbus, Ohio-based Bold Penguin completed a $32 million Series B funding round, bringing its total capital raised to more than $50 million since launching in 2016, the company announced in September.

The threat of a small business cyberattack has introduced a conundrum for the rising InsurTech market. The demand for cyber insurance is on the rise – the sector is expected to reach a $7.5 billion valuation by the end of the decade, with small businesses a rising customer demographic. Yet those small companies remain one of the largest targets for fraudsters, with nearly half of attacks targeting SMBs, making them risky clients for insurance providers.