Ascend, an insurance payment platform that offers financing, collections, and payables, has raised $30m in a Series A in an equity funding round.

Concurrently, Ascend has secured $250m in debt to finance insurance premium loans through its platform backed by Hudson Structured Capital Management (HSCM).

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Index Ventures led the equity portion of the funding, which was joined by new investors such as Distributed Ventures and its anchor limited partner NFP, HSCM Bermuda, XYZ Ventures, and several angel investors.

Existing investors First Round Capital, Susa Ventures, and FirstMark Capital joined the funding round.

Ascend will use the funding to add new members to the team, which will work to improve Ascend’s product offering.

The insurtech platform will use the debt proceeds to streamline both commercial and personal lines of insurance loans.

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Ascend leverages APIs to automate insurance payments from an online point of sale (POS) with buy now, pay later (BNPL) financing and distribution of commissions and carrier payables.

Currently, Ascend’s offering is available in all 50 states of the US. In September 2021, Ascend has raised $5.5m in a seed funding round.

Index Ventures partner Mark Goldberg said: “Building a modern checkout experience that feels more Shopify and less like filing tax forms is the biggest opportunity in the insurance market today. There’s an immediate need for the type of verticalised and embedded end-to-end payments product that spans brokers, MGAs, and carriers.”

Ascend co-founder and co-CEO Praveen Chekuri said: “Our payment software greatly reduces purchase friction for customers buying insurance while simultaneously reducing or eliminating traditionally labour-intensive operational processes for brokerages, MGAs, and carriers. “With this new funding, we can meet that demand and help more customers use Ascend’s embedded payments and buy-now-pay-later offering.”