Ignatica's suite of Saas offerings allows insurance providers to create and edit coverages and plans, dynamically adjust pricing and product configurations in seconds.
Could you explain what your startup does in a few sentences?
Ignatica’s platform lets insurers quickly and efficiently build and launch new products at low costs, while drastically reducing administration costs and transforming the servicing experience for consumers. Ignatica’s suite of SaaS offerings allows insurance product managers to create and edit coverages and plans, dynamically adjust pricing, and change product configurations in seconds. They also enable servicing and back-office operations to be automated and pushed to the front edge for digital self-service for even the most complex insurance products.
What is something you wish you knew when you started putting together your business?
That sometimes you can’t see the forest for the trees. And what I mean by that is that when you’re in that initial sprint, creating the product, hiring the right team, reaching out to investors, sometimes you forget that there comes a point where you stop being an engineer, or a marketing director or whatever defined your career before you became an entrepreneur. You have to wear so many more hats as a business owner, sometimes the skills from when you were an employee come in handy; other skills you pick up as you go forward out of necessity, but you don’t know that when you begin to build your first company.
What plans do you have for your startup in the next several months?
Grow and scale-up – We have just closed our 7M USD seed financing round and we are at 52 employees by now heading to be about 100 by the end of the year. We are planning to expand our operations in Europe, grow into Singapore, and open up an office in Canada. We aim to grow from 1M Revenue to 5M Revenue.
What is your unique selling point to potential customers out there?
Ignatica offers digital self-service and intelligent automation solutions for insurers allowing them to launch new products quickly and efficiently while greatly reducing administration costs and drastically improving the client servicing experience.
We do this because we created an architecture and technology stack that would support the following key solution elements:
• Distributed Technology: providing us self-healing, easy to upgrade, and modularize full application-level resiliency.
• Unstructured Data Management, which gives us the ability to evolve data models and to soft link data relations to the real world.
• Fortress-level data security and traceability that still support the distributed technology framework.
• 100% Cloud-native: providing improvement in scalability and resilience and lower TCO.
• The ready availability of developers without the need to have specialized skills on proprietary technology.
What advice would you share with someone thinking about starting a business?
It’s not enough to be fearless; you must be so confident in your business proposition that you anticipate change, not as a roadblock, but as an opportunity.
Your business will change, either gradually through testing, probing—a couple steps forward, a couple steps back—or with one fell swoop, whether it’s the landing of a major client or an event beyond your control, like the pandemic.
Over the past year, Ignatica confronted the new realities of COVID-19 pandemic. Beginning in February of 2020, everything in the insurance industry froze as insurers had to pivot to respond to a slew of new issues regarding not just their products, but to the new reality: workers insurance, travel insurance, and health insurance plans, as well as “working from home” and the larger economic impact of the pandemic.
However, as other businesses downsized or furloughed employees, Ignatica was able to grow, leveraging an incredible pool of available talent. The global impact of the pandemic created challenges, but at the same time opportunities. Over the past year, insurance companies more than ever realized that they need a true digital transformation within their business.
As clients reprioritized and shifted focus, Ignatica, created to accommodate such systemic changes, responded in kind. Insurers looked to focus on new product lines, like targeted insurance, and on true digital servicing and operations. While other companies shrank, Ignatica grew from eight employees to now more than 50, more than quadrupling in size in both staffing and market traction.
Prepare for the unexpected by understanding that the planning and implementation of a fine-tuned plan will only get you so far; you have to take the world as it comes at you and respond in kind. As Bruce Lee said, “be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way around or through it.”