Harper Raises $47M to Build an AI-Native Insurance Brokerage

Harper, an AI-native commercial insurance brokerage, has raised $47 million across its Series A and seed round, as first reported by TechCrunch. The Series A was led by Emergence Capital, with participation from Pioneer Fund, Peak XV Partners, Antler, 10X Founders, Fellows Fund, and Outset Capital. Pioneer Fund and Y Combinator also backed Harper's seed round.

Harper operates as a licensed commercial insurance agency that uses AI to handle the work traditionally done by teams of analysts and brokers: reading applications, routing submissions to carriers, following up with underwriters, managing quotes, and collecting documents. The company says it can get businesses covered in 24 to 48 hours, compared to the five to seven days a traditional broker typically takes. Where a human-led sales team handles 20 to 30 deals a month, Harper processes more than 1,000 customers a month, and has served over 5,000 to date.

The company matches small- and mid-sized businesses with more than 165 insurance carriers for workers' compensation, general liability, and professional liability. Its focus is on complex commercial risks: manufacturers, healthcare providers, transportation fleets, construction firms, hospitality groups, and the restaurants and bars that anchor Main Streets across the country.

CEO Dakotah Rice grew up in rural Alabama, where his dad ran a nightclub and his uncle operated a trucking fleet. Rice spent his childhood helping with inventory and watching his family navigate a system that, as he puts it, never seemed to work for them. His uncle's trucking company didn't fail because of bad operations, Rice says, but because financing and insurance costs crushed it.

Rice went on to work at Goldman Sachs, Carlyle, and spent four years as an investment analyst at Coatue before dropping out of Harvard Business School to start the investment platform Poolit. That company closed in 2023, and Rice told TechCrunch he should have shut it down a year earlier. For Harper, he reunited with co-founder and CTO Tushar Nair, who he first met at Goldman Sachs. The company, which came through YC's W25 batch, is named after Rice's mother's maiden name.

The round also includes what the company says is the largest publicly disclosed Series A ever raised by a Black founder. Rice acknowledges the significance but is clear about the why: "We raised this money because of what we've built."

The approach fits a trend YC recently highlighted, arguing that the future of agencies will look more like software companies with software margins. Rice sees the opportunity in the broader brokerage market's fragmentation, where most firms still run on email and spreadsheets.

The funding will go toward scaling the engineering team, deepening carrier relationships, and investing in the AI infrastructure that lets Harper serve complex commercial accounts at scale. Rice's longer-term vision extends well beyond insurance.