Origin Story

The story of Talage started with a customer-first approach that is often found in traditional insurance agents, which is why it probably came from an agent. Talage’s own, Adam Kiefer, has spent his entire career in small commercial insurance and wanted to bring innovation to the distribution channel. He set to work with co-founder Matt Donovan on how best to distribute coverage to small businesses across the country.

While the team grew they continued to focus on the end-user and built a first of its kind digital platform that tied directly into the carrier’s underwriting systems. This allowed quotes to be delivered instantly to the end-user, this new platform allowed them to sell millions in premium to customers in more than 40 states.

As we continued to grow our business we worked closely with some of the leading insurance carriers in the industry. All of our partners loved the quality of business we were driving and we kept hearing them say how do we get 100s of Talages? This was our light bulb moment – we didn’t need to focus on changing how businesses bought insurance (they have already been purchasing professional services online for years), we needed to change how agents sold coverage. This was how we could truly drive change in the industry.

Agents bring clear value to their customers both in the buying process and in servicing existing accounts. However, there is no reason why that value can’t be delivered to customers via digital channels. At Talage we are committed to building tools that help today’s agents operate online so they can provide their customers with the digital experience they expect.

With a new focus on the agent channel, the team at Talage received the backing from some of the industries leading investors. To date, Talage has raised over $7 million from such Silicon Valley VCs as Merus Capital, WTI, and Calibrate Ventures, along with such insurance industry leaders as BrokerTech Ventures, Holmes Murphy, PayneWest and others.

We’re partnering with top-rated insurance companies (we have 12 carriers on board and counting) and we’re finding new ways to help agents reach small businesses where they are. There are really exciting things happening in the field of data analytics that will allow us to better understand and even predict how small businesses operate. This will allow agents to run their businesses more efficiently, service their business communities more effectively, and increase revenue.

We’re proud of trimming the commercial insurance buying process from days or weeks to less than 10 minutes (on average), but we aren’t done yet. What if we could accurately understand businesses using public data to simplify the application process even more? The insurance buying process could be trimmed to under a minute.

Talage is bridging the gap for agents, carriers, and small businesses. No matter where you are and no matter who you buy insurance from, the insurance buying experience is going to look a lot different in the next few years and it’s going to be a lot better- for everyone.