SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 12, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Socotra , creator of the first cloud-native, productized insurance core platform, announced today that it has raised an additional $5.2 million in funding on the heels of its $5.5 million Series A , bringing its total funding to $18 million. Investors included 8VC, which also led the Series A, the venture investment arm of insurance and financial services provider Nationwide , and MS&AD Ventures , the venture arm of Japan-based insurer Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance . Previous investors include a subsidiary of USAA, which invested in a seed round and again in Socotra’s Series A.

Socotra is the industry’s first cloud-native platform with open configuration and APIs , empowering insurers to deploy powerful backend technology with their own engineering resources or the systems integrator of their choice. Socotra provides the core technologies upon which innovative personalized insurance products can be built. Socotra’s agility, flexibility, reliability, and modern design offer carriers lower costs, faster product releases, and easy integration with future technologies.

“The insurance industry is experiencing a technology revolution, and the winners will not be powered by today's legacy technologies,” said Jon Soberg, managing partner, MS&AD Ventures. “Socotra has built the most complete productized SaaS platform in the market, and they have a world class engineering team. We’re excited to contribute to Socotra’s continued success.”

“We have been closely following Socotra’s progress for 18 months, and have been continually impressed by the company’s clarity of vision and speed of execution,” said Erik Ross, vice president and leader of Nationwide’s venture capital team. “We’re excited to be investors and even more excited about how our relationship could evolve to the benefit of our members.”

“In addition to a repeated commitment from 8VC, we’re thrilled that Socotra’s mission is supported by such respected industry giants as MS&AD and Nationwide,” said Dan Woods, CEO of Socotra. “With this new capital, we will accelerate product enhancements and reach even more insurers trapped by artifact IT systems.”

Nationwide and MS&AD join previous investors 8VC, Founders Fund, Greenoaks Capital, SciFi VC, SV Angel, Tuesday Capital (formerly CrunchFund), and subsidiary of USAA, and Vulcan Capital.

With customers on three continents ranging from startups to Fortune 500 global businesses, Socotra enables carriers to achieve new levels of agility throughout the policy lifecycle (single or multi-line, life or Property and Casualty, commercial or retail). Carriers interested in trying Socotra can visit www.socotra.com or write inquiries@socotra.com to request a demo and evaluation license.

About Nationwide Nationwide, a Fortune 100 company based in Columbus, Ohio, is one of the largest and strongest diversified insurance and financial services organizations in the United States. Nationwide is rated A+ by both A.M. Best and Standard & Poor’s. An industry leader in driving customer-focused innovation, Nationwide provides a full range of insurance and financial services products including auto, business, homeowners, farm and life insurance; public and private sector retirement plans, annuities and mutual funds; excess & surplus, specialty and surety; pet, motorcycle and boat insurance. For more information, visit www.nationwide.com. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

About MS&AD MS&AD Ventures is the venture arm of MS&AD Group Holdings, the largest insurance conglomerate in Asia and the 8 th largest in the world. MS&AD does business across 47 countries and regions worldwide. MS&AD Ventures has a mission to contribute to a vibrant society and help secure a sound future for our world by investing in technology companies that create innovative business models, products and services that help people live better lives.

About 8VC 8VC is a Silicon-Valley based technology investment firm investing in visionary teams and backing industry-transforming companies. The partners have a proven track-record as founders, engineers, and operators of successful companies including Palantir, Addepar and OpenGov, among others. The firm was founded in 2012 and currently manages $2.7bn+ in AUM, investing primarily in smart enterprise platforms, Bio-IT, health-IT, logistics, consumer, real estate and others. For more information, please visit http://8vc.com .

About Socotra Socotra is the core technology platform of tomorrow’s digitally-transformed insurer. Only Socotra brings the staggering technology infrastructure advances of the last decade to the insurance industry. The result is a new, simplified, radically open, cloud-native core platform that supports underwriting, policy administration, claims, billing, reporting, and much more. Socotra delivers agility, reliability, and a clear path to the many InsurTech promises of today and tomorrow. Learn more at www.socotra.com .

Contact: Joseph Eckert for Socotra media@socotra.com 650-353-5713