New York, San Francisco investors place $5 million in Boise insurance platform

Boise-based Covr Financial has been hiring developers and support staff since receiving $5 million in funding from investors on both coasts.

Todd Ruplinger, owner of National Brokerage, founded Covr Financial in 2013 under the name 1 Click Coverage. Covr Financial is a digital platform that helps financial institutions sell and underwrite life insurance policies and helps customers find and secure plans.

“Insurance is a clumsy process and we’re going out looking for ways it can be more efficient,” Ruplinger said.

“The trend is that clients today would rather buy life insurance through financial institutions (than insurance agents), but that is a harder process,” he said. “You have so much paperwork on both the insurance and financial side of things and they don’t communicate well.”

Covr Financial works with more than 20 insurance companies and 50 financial institutions to better streamline the process when a client purchases a plan through a bank, credit union or broker. Ruplinger said the platform reduces the time it takes to get a plan approved from a couple of months to a few days.

Other companies build digital insurance platforms, but most focus on the financial side or the insurance side instead of both, Ruplinger said.

Covr has attracted investors, securing $5 million from the venture capital firms Nyca Partners, Commerce Ventures, Connectivity Capital Partners and Contour Venture Partners in June.

“Covr is clearly the best platform,” said Hans Morris, lead investor at Nyca Partners in New York City, which specializes in financial technology. “By tying together consumers, carriers and leading financial institutions, Covr’s management has done a superior job of managing its growth.”

The company is using the funding to bolster its staff. Since April, Covr has increased its staff from 55 to 77 and its looking to fill 25 more positions — mostly focused on servicing the insurance advisers Covr partners with and further developing its platform, said Jennifer Pugh, head of HR and recruiting at Covr.

In the last year, Covr Financial has increased the number of insurance advisers its works with from 400 to 23,000. Most of these, about 20,000, came on July 7 when Morgan Stanley integrated Cover’s service with its own.