Our Investment in Ascend
By Courtney Buie Lipkin, Partner at Susa Ventures
By Courtney Buie Lipkin, Partner at Susa Ventures
Today we’re thrilled to announce our investment in Ascend, the modern insurance payments platform that increases policy retention and streamlines financing, collections, and payables for insurance customers. Susa invested alongside an incredible group of insurtech and early stage investors including First Round Capital, FirstMark, South Park Commons, Box Group, and Financial Venture Studio, as well as several insurtech angels. We’re excited to welcome Ascend founders Andrew Wynn, Praveen Chekuri, and their entire team to the Susa family.
Susa has partnered with several innovative insurtech companies over the years. As we work to support these teams, a common theme we hear relates to the frustrating lack of payments infrastructure in the industry. The proliferation of technology has improved underwriting, distribution, policy verification and much more. However, insurance companies still need to wrangle paper checks, ACH, and credit card payments in what should be a simple payment system — not to mention the uniquely complex accounting structures these archaic payment flows necessitate.
When Andrew and Praveen described their vision for an online point of sale with buy now, pay later financing, we knew it was the perfect solution to improve distribution of commissions and carrier payables. Existing premium finance companies take customers out of the modern digital checkout flow with jarring pen and paper processes. Ascend enables modern insurance distributors to sell more policies while eliminating expensive and labor intensive internal processes that sandbag growth.
Insurance is the backbone of our economy, yet it’s still catching up to the digital age. Customers have come to expect seamless online checkouts in all aspects of their daily life. Insurance can be one of the largest and most consequential purchases for businesses and this heightens the importance of quality risk advice, products, and customer experience. Ascend enables the new wave of insurance innovators to meet the needs of their customers, partners, and employees. We couldn’t be more excited to partner with Ascend on their mission to reinvent the modern payment infrastructure for insurance.
Ascend is hiring across all departments, including customer success, business development, engineering, product, and recruiting. More on their open positions here.