Scout InsurTech Interview with Buddy

Buddy is a Richmond, VA based InsurTech. They seek to transform the tools of risk to revolutionize how the world protects and prospers. Chris Luiz sat with Co-Founder and CEO, Charles Merritt, to learn more about how Buddy is impacting the industry.

Who are Buddy’s clients?

Buddy sells software to insurance carriers and brokers who want to sell insurance online. We power direct insurance sales, broker and agent sales and embedded insurance—all popular flavors of the functionality we provide. Think of us as the picks and shovels that help businesses dig for new customers in the world of e-commerce, along with all the rails necessary to move premium and data back to their systems.

What does your product do?

Buddy’s platform is the simplest way for carriers, brokers and distribution partners to implement and transact insurance on the internet. We enable increased access, improved awareness and better connectivity to insurance for generations to come – three leading opportunities to combat stunted growth in the insurance industry where premium hikes have recently provided the preponderance of lift in revenue [McKinsey Global Insurance Report 2025: The Pursuit of Growth].

In simple terms, Buddy builds software to make insurance rapidly available to sell in all types of online environments.

Our product has three pillars:

The ION Engine: the mythical Rosetta Stone of digital insurance, indexing products to make them extensible as software
The Offer Element: the cheat code to add insurance e-commerce to any software that you are building or using in just minutes
Buddy Manager & Insured Portal: the dashboards and tooling for our customers and their stakeholders

Was the company born from within or outside the insurance industry?

Our founding team represents a mix of insurance outsiders with deep consumer tech and e-commerce roots as well as career insurance folks with enough insurance knowledge to solve industry challenges. We started by building insurance products for people with active outdoor lifestyles. We developed our own insurance products with Lloyd’s and built the software to power them.

Along this journey, the world got turned upside down, and we were forced to focus on the crystalline truth about our superpowers—what makes Buddy, Buddy—which was all about building the most accessible insurance through e-commerce.

As humanity suddenly became aware of the broad-reaching effects of a global pandemic, we recognized that this was the catalyzing moment to open up the tools of managing risk to the modern, online economy. Our team got to work. We approached our partners, got curious, and before long, we were enabling online access to insurance for events to reopen, for healthcare workers on the front lines and for people to get back to their day-to-day lives.

Today, Buddy is the preferred technology partner of some of the largest insurance companies and brokers on Earth. We equip, accelerate and innovate alongside them, forging new strategies and business opportunities to reach their customers on the internet and launch their journey into a new dimension.

What growth metrics have you accomplished over the last 12 months?

At our core, we are a software company, and we hold our producer licenses in the US for most major lines of insurance, which allows for us to be compliant in how we power insurance transactions for our customers.

Our business model is based on the idea that our customers need software for e-commerce that supports their testing, learning and scaling. We believe that these tools should be accessible for regional carriers and robust enough for Global 50 insurance companies. So, our pricing model is based on a modest SaaS fee and a sliding scale transaction fee that aligns our economic interests with those of our customers.

Over the past year:

We’ve more than tripled our overall transaction volume.
Our SaaS revenue has grown more than 4x year-on-year.
We’ve more than doubled the number of products we’re powering for our customers.
We’ve added three new categories of insurance to our platform.

These accomplishments are helping us learn and expand into different areas of the business.

How much capital have you raised?

We’ve raised a little over $8 million total to date.

Within your domain, what is the current challenge that the industry is facing?

In the domain of e-commerce for insurance, where customers shop, price and purchase products online, the biggest challenges are:

Matching Speed: There’s often a mismatch between the speed consumers expect in their buying process and the slower systems of insurance companies. Many carriers use multiple or outdated systems, with limited availability across states. For e-commerce, which is geographically neutral, this creates hurdles—especially in embedded environments. Platforms often require products that work across all 50 states, DC, Puerto Rico, Guam and internationally. If a product has limited availability, it’s less attractive for partners—which is something that Buddy can help solve for by orchestrating multiple products or across multiple carriers to deliver a comprehensive solution to the market.
Regulatory Variability: Regulatory interpretations differ wildly among carriers, leading to inconsistent customer experiences. For example, some carriers require customers to consent to terms and conditions before they even interact with the product, while others take a more seamless approach. This lack of standardization creates friction for e-commerce platforms looking for a smoother process. Buddy provides recommendations on best practices, based on our experience, and we also have the ability to manage complex regulatory requirements on a state-by-state level.

How does Buddy take a unique approach to providing value?

We take a unique approach through our product strategy. Our software is designed to sit agnostically on top of whatever a carrier or broker is using—be it modern policy administration software, no software or a mix of systems. We orchestrate these systems into a single point of implementation and transaction.

Our product philosophy is also unique. We design from the customer in, rather than from the insurance company out. This focus has allowed us to deliver exceptional customer and developer experiences. For instance, one of our customers needed a registration insurance product integrated into a registration platform. During a meeting, the platform’s engineers implemented our product into their development environment in just nine seconds. This seamless integration reflects the value we provide: enabling deals to go live quickly and efficiently.

Can you share any goals you have for the company over the next 12 months?

Our long-term objective is to index every insurance product on the planet. In the next 12 months, we aim to:

Index more insurance products into our engine.
Launch several interesting partnerships, including collaborations with companies outside the insurance industry.
Raise our next round to accelerate our growth and success.

These goals reflect our focus on expanding our reach and enabling more innovative partnerships.

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