(Newswire.net — March 8, 2019) — Pie Insurance, a workers’ compensation insurance provider, has raised $45 million in series B funding. The funding round brings Pie’s total capital raised to $61 million. Pie will use the funding to help utilize new distribution sources with an attempt to offer new workers’ compensation options to small businesses.
The service will allow small businesses to purchase insurance in the same way that people purchase products and services online.
Pie claims that they will be able to help small businesses find savings in the process, offering a streamlined method of obtaining workers’ compensation. Pie, founded in 2017, has been able to save its consumers an average of 30% on their premiums thanks to the company’s analytic background, which helps eliminate steps in the purchase process, identify risks and also prices policies.
Workers’ compensation is a rising industry, with small and large businesses required to have workers’ compensation policies in many states. Oregon, for example, reports that there were 35 on-the-job deaths in 2018. The figure was the same from the year prior and it remains the highest number of deaths in the previous five years.
Preliminary data provided does not include county-level data, which is not yet available.
Nine workers were killed in the fishing, forestry and agriculture industries in 2018. Seven deaths were also reported in logging, and an additional seven deaths were reported in the transportation and warehousing industries.
Despite increased safety measures, on-the-job deaths continue to rise in Oregon and many other states. Workers’ compensation doesn’t include all employees. A report from the Workplace Fatalities in Oregon program showed that between 2015 and 2016, on-the-job deaths rose 50%, from 41 people to 61 people.
Nevada is also changing its workers’ compensation laws in an attempt to drive decreases in workers’ compensation costs. The state has approved a loss-cost and assigned risk rate decrease that will provide an 8.1% decrease in voluntary loss cost and a 7.3% decrease for assigned-risk rates.
Automation and workplace safety measures have allowed for a drop in overall insurance costs that burden small businesses the most. Workers who are injured are required to report to their employer and have a workers’ compensation claim filed. If a claim is denied, an appeal can be filed within 30 days of the hearing officer’s decision in the State of Nevada.
Pie Insurance wants to be able to reduce these rates for clients, offering their own risk analysis and rates that are 30% lower on average.