Bold Penguin

Bold Penguin provides technology services for agents, brokers and carriers. It give companies multiple ways to grow and own commercial insurance with varying levels of commitment and ownership.

Bold Penguin operates an Exchange which utilises a set of solutions to identify, triage, quote and bind commercial insurance efficiently and simply. Their products (Terminal, API and Connect) consist of three core features: a recommendation engine, single-interface multiple-quote capability, and a user-controlled carrier ranking setting. Bold Penguin also has its own API and libraries to enable brokers to build their own user interfaces on top of their recommendation engine.

The venture offers a solution in all 50 states across most business categories, including general liability, workers compensation, professional liability and commercial auto.

In 2018 Bold Penguin announced its major Exchange partnerships had quadrupled. As it reached its third year of business, Bold Penguin announced it has reached 2% of all small to medium-size business in the United States through their Exchange.

In 2019 Bold Penguin announced it was working with Progressive to power its new online quoting platform for small business owners, BusinessQuote Explorer (BQX). In the same year it was announced the venture was working with Nationwide to create and deliver a digital storefront for commercial agents and customers.

Later that year, in September, Bold Penguin announced it had raised $32m in a Series B funding round. Investors included Hudson Structured Capital Management, Lightstone, Guggenheim Insurance, Lockton and more. The funding will be put towards engineering and platform improvements, as well as expansion in excess and surplus lines.

In October 2019 Bold Penguin partnered with Everquote for the latter's launch of its commercial lines marketplace, using Bold Penguin's infrastructure to accelerate its path to market.

In January 2020 Bold Penguin announced it had acquired E&S brokerage tech platform Xagent for an undisclosed amount. Bold Penguin hopes that the acquired tech will be integrated with Bold Penguin's Exchange, and retain Xagent's 8 staff. That same month the company partnered with Berkshire Hathaway's biBerk, enabling the users of the Bold Penguin platform to to access biBerk's suite of workers compensation products. This includes agents and brokers being able to triage, quote, and bind commercial insurance coverage on the platform via an API.

The following month, Bold Penguin launched a new auto insurance service to its platform, enabling business-use auto insurance to be quoted with other types of cover in a bundle.

In October 2020 Bold Penguin acquired RiskGenius for an undisclosed amount. RiskGenius will become part of Bold Penguin's insurance intelligence effort, which leverages data and has a focus on intuitive workflow processing. The two plan to 'combine efforts and identify plans to increase the velocity of features being produced'.

In January 2021, Bold Penguin announced it had been acquired by American Family Insurance Mutual Holding Company. The deal is currently pending regulatory approval, and financial details are not being disclosed. Bold Penguin will maintain its name and business model.

In April 2021 Bold Penguin partnered with digital business insurtech Thimble, adding flexible hourly coverage to the Bold Penguin Exchange via APIs. Thimble's coverage options are designed to give more control to businesses of all sizes, and thanks to its flexible offering, small businesses can buy cover by-the-job if they need to.

In June 2021 it was revealed Bold Penguin was planning a major expansion that would add more than 160 jobs.

The company launched two new AI-powered products - SubmissionLink and ClauseLink - in November 2021 to assist professionals in commercial underwriting.

During May 2023 the company agreed to enter a partnership with digital transformation company Sutherland. The arrangement was said to be made to accelerate digital transformation in customer acquisition, new business and underwriting for the commercial insurance sector. Sutherland’s AI-based underwriting ecosystem was to integrate with Bold Penguin’s analytics capabilities.