Next Insurance, the leading digital insurtech company transforming small business insurance, today announced that it has completed the purchase of Juniper Labs, an innovative provider of alternative open data and underwriting technology focused on small businesses. Together, Next Insurance and Juniper Labs will continue to develop enhanced machine-learning capabilities and tools to strengthen the omni-channel customer experience. This is Next Insurance’s first acquisition and follows the close of its $250 million Series D financing round at a $2 billion valuation.
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Juniper Labs provides better risk transparency by leveraging open data and machine learning to build tools for streamlined data collection and automated underwriting. Using natural language processing, Juniper Labs blends fragmented data sources and unstructured content to provide more structured insights that strengthen the confidence and predictive power of their models, ultimately allowing for more precise risk assessment and a simpler customer experience.
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“The insurance sector is primed for innovation and our growth this year not only speaks to the industry’s potential, but the benefits that can result from leveraging the right technologies and focusing on customer experiences,” said Sofya Pogreb, COO of Next Insurance. “This strategic acquisition of Juniper Labs’ technology and expertise in workers’ compensation will deepen our investments in relevant technologies such as machine learning, which will help scale pricing and decision making. We look forward to bringing on the Juniper Labs team to further our goal of being the one-stop-shop for small business insurance.”
Juniper Labs co-founder and CEO Lance Poole, and his team, will join Next Insurance’s machine learning and data analytics group and will help launch the Next Insurance Data Labs. The purpose of the lab is to combine human-centric design, actuarial science, and state-of-the-art machine learning to provide scalable, industry-leading solutions that drive growth and risk-based pricing. Additionally, the Juniper Labs team will help strengthen and scale Next Insurance’s workers’ compensation offering (among other lines of business), which has seen nearly a 14x increase in year-over-year growth since November 2019.
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