Huckleberry, a tech company offering insurance to small businesses, has announced that it is moving its headquarters from San Francisco to NYC by the end of this summer, with plans to build out its technical, insurance and financial services teams. In total, the company wants to hire 60 people over the next year.
In a nutshell, Huckleberry takes the traditionally cumbersome process of getting business insurance — negotiations with brokers, mountains of PDFs and documentation — and condenses it down into a simple, five-minute, online experience. The goal, says co-founder and CEO Bryan O’Connell, is to “relieve some cognitive load” for small business owners, giving them one less administrative task to worry about.
O’Connel says Huckleberry has been growing “immensely” in the last year, tripling its headcount and significantly increasing premiums month over month in 2020, even during the worst economic months of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Despite the fact that a lot of business activity has contracted over the last year, insurance is not like buying software for one of these businesses. It’s not an optional purchase,” O’Connell told Built In. “The commercial insurance space is worth about $300 billion, and $100 billion of that is the SMB space — we call it the ‘less than 100 employees’ space. When you’re the first and one of the only digital players in an industry like that, even in tough economic times, it’s still possible to grow a lot and take a lot of share. Because you’re taking share from traditional incumbents.”
O’Connell says this move east was brought on, in part, because of the pandemic. San Francisco is an expensive city, and the company wasn’t sure they could justify paying high rent for an office no one was using.
Of course, New York isn’t exactly cheap either. But what attracted the company was the city’s talent and position as a fintech hub. In fact, Huckleberry has already brought on a new chief insurance officer, Braden Davis, who has spent his career at various insurance carriers and other insurance tech startups here in NYC.
“That kind of talent, you really just don’t find in San Francisco because, historically, there’ve been far fewer old-school insurance companies headquartered there. They’re more in New York and the East Coast,” O’Connell said. “And that trickles down — it’s not just the executive ranks. If you want to hire product managers or directors of products from fintech startups, you’re going to have a lot more of those in New York City than you would in San Francisco.”
Huckleberry also recently brought on Bill Kaper, a former VP of engineering at Root Insurance, to lead its second HQ in Ohio as chief technology officer.
“It’s an exciting time to be joining Huckleberry, one of the fastest growing insurtech players in the $100B+ small business insurance space,” Kaper said in a statement provided to Built In. “As 2020 showed us, small business owners and operators have enough challenges day to day — buying insurance should not be one of them. I’m excited to join Huckleberry in their mission to use technology to make it fast and simple for a small business owner to buy fairly priced insurance that protects their employees and their business.”
