Foresight Group raises $39 million
Foresight Group, which includes workers compensation insurance startup Foresight Commercial Insurance and risk management platform Safesite, has secured $39 million in Series B funding. The round was led by OMERS Ventures, with participation from new investors Digital Garage Ventures and the George Kaiser Family Foundation. Past investors Brick and Mortar Ventures and Builders VC also participated in the round, which brings Foresight’s total funding to date to $59 million.
Foresight is licensed in California, Texas, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana, with an appetite for construction and trades, agriculture, manufacturing, and light industrial. Every Foresight policy comes with free access to Safesite, where companies can conduct safety inspections and manage and track safety engagement, among other things.
The combination of Foresight and Safesite is delivering positive results according to numbers shared by the startup. Foresight demonstrated a reduction in the frequency of policyholders’ workplace safety incidents by an average of 31%, and its combined ratio and loss ratio at the close of its first year of underwriting was 82% and 61%, respectively.
In addition to geographic expansion, Foresight’s 2022 strategic targets include exploring adjacent commercial lines of business to complement their workers compensation product, and continuing to source “the best underwriting, business development, and insurance talent across the US.”
“From securing appointments with 13 of the top 15 property and casualty brokers in the U.S., to bringing nearly $1 billion in submissions in the door, to attracting and retaining top industry talent, we’ve hit our stride while growing sustainably. We’ve stuck firmly to our core mission – delivering our policyholder clients a reduction in workplace safety incidents and a reduction in premiums. We’re eager to show all of our stakeholders what’s in store for year two and beyond.” – David Fontain, CEO and co-founder of Foresight.
“Foresight and Safesite bring unparalleled value to the work comp market, in a space where incumbents have been somewhat limited from a service standpoint for quite some time. Last year we saw clients increase their monthly safety actions by 330% in safety activity with Safesite. The machine learning and data science behind the Safesite Score allows us to benchmark safety performance in real time, and empowers our clients to improve their safety behaviors. Our policyholders love that they can actively work toward reducing their premiums over time through interactions with our platform. – Peter Grant, CEO and co-founder of Safesite.
“Insurance innovation has rarely found its way to hard-to-place businesses in the construction, manufacturing and agriculture segments of our economy, but that’s exactly what Foresight has been revolutionizing. With its Safesite mobile application, Foresight has the ability to drive behavior change among its insureds to foster a safer work environment. And a work site with fewer injuries drives down workers compensation premiums for the policyholder and drives up profitability for the insurer. These are the virtuous cycles that we look for when investing in the insurtech arena.” – Michael Yang, managing partner of OMERS Ventures.
