Root Insurance confirmed it has pulled in a $350 million venture capital infusion, a few weeks after news of the imminent financing leaked early.
The Wall Street Journal reported in late August that the online auto insurance InsurTech was nearly finished raising the money.
“This latest capital will allow us to extend our innovation lead and accelerate our strategy to transform the car insurance world for the benefit of consumers,” Alex Timm, Co-founder and CEO of Root, said in prepared remarks.
Specifically, Root said it plans to use the Series E financing to accelerate an ongoing expansion and development of new products. DST Global and Coatue Management led the latest funding, though existing investors Drive Capital, Redpoint Ventures, Ribbit Capital, Scale Venture Partners, and Tiger Global Management all participated in this round, along with several new investors. Root added that the new financing raises its valuation to $3.65 billion.
To date, Root, which launched in 2015, has raised $523 million in venture capital, along with an additional $100 million in debt financing.
If raising venture capital is a horse race, then Root is neck-and-neck with Lemonade, a peer-to-peer insurer focused on homeowners and renters insurance that raised $300 million in financing in April, and has raised close to $500 million thus far.
Root, which launched in 2015, claims it has reshaped the $250 billion U.S. auto insurance industry by using smartphone technology to understand individual driving behavior. The company relies on telematics and smartphone-related technology to reward good drivers with cheaper insurance rates.
Root recently expanded into its 29th state, and the company asserts it can now reach 65 percent of the U.S. driving population. Its telematics-based approach doesn’t work everywhere, however. Earlier in August, Root disclosed it had entered the California market, but telematics aren’t used in the state.
Root said it wrote more than $187 million in insurance premiums in the first six months of 2019, a number it claims is 824 percent higher than the same period in 2018.
Source: Root Insurance