(Image source: Limelight Health homepage.)

Limelight Health, a San Francisco-based startup quoting, underwriting, and proposal platform for the employee benefits industry, has announced $33.5 million in series C funding, led by Principal Life (Des Moines), with participation from AXA Venture Partners (Paris; formerly AXA Strategic Ventures), MassMutual Ventures (Boston), Aflac Ventures (Columbus, Ga.), Transamerica Ventures (New York), Wells Fargo Strategic Capital (a division of Wells Fargo Commercial Capital, San Francisco), LaunchPad Digital Health (San Francisco), and Wanxiang America Healthcare Investments (Elgin, Ill.) Limelight Health says it will use the funds for product development, customer acquisition, global expansion and hiring efforts. The company says it will enhance product features to add more automation, enhanced workflow, an underwriter certification program, as well as risk scores based on data sets for better underwriting.

“This round of funding gives us the capital to execute on our vision—creating a new standard for how products are created, underwritten, rated and presented to employers,” comments Jason T. Andrew, CEO and co-founder, Limelight Health. “As we enter our fifth year, we’re thrilled to share that our users will begin to see a number of enhancements that will bring substantial efficiencies.”

“The employee benefits industry has long been dominated by manual workflows, redundant processes and poor user experiences, but we’re rolling up our sleeves to help with modernizing and enhancing the infrastructure to create a much better user experience,” Andrew adds.

Limelight Health describes its mission as helping medical and ancillary carriers to transform the way they quote, underwrite and serve employer groups. Its platform offers a range of microservices that the company describes as highly configurable for business needs including quoting, rating, proposal generation, renewals, automated processing for pre-sales, new business, underwriting, enrollment support, renewals, data analysis, reporting, consumer delivery and agent self-service, document management and all-in-one integration with industry systems and services. Limelight Health asserts that these capabilities dramatically shorten sales cycles, improve turnaround times, and increase profits for carriers.

“At Principal, we are committed to helping advance innovations that are laser-focused on solving real challenges for advisors, small and medium-size businesses and their employees,” comments Kara Hoogensen VP, Group Benefits, U.S. Insurance Solutions, Principal Life. “We are proud to be a leader in the insurance industry in offering Limelight Health’s impressive cloud-based enterprise software that will modernize the quote-to-enroll process while breaking down key barriers hindering sixty percent of SMBs from providing ancillary benefits.”

Period of Rapid Growth

The funding round follows a period of growth during the previous year and a half, during which Limelight Health reports that its recurring revenues per month grew 750 percent. During this same 16-month period, the company says it more than doubled the headcount of its team from 45 to 110 employees, including the appointments of new seasoned executives including Pete Espinosa as VP of Enterprise Sales and Alliances (previous Global Head of Sales at Guidewire Software), Bob Sanguedolce (previous CIO at Ebay) and Bob Gaydos (30-year employee benefits executive) as advisors.

Limelight Health has also expanded its board membership with the additions of Lerk-Ling Chang and Kara Hoogensen. Chang brings with her 17 years of product development leadership at Guidewire Software, where she is currently VP of Strategic Ventures, Corporate Strategy & Corporate Development Group. Hoogensen’s experience includes more than 20 years at Principal, where she is currently VP of Group Benefits in Insurance Solutions.

AXA’s VC Company Invests in Mobile Health Benefits Tech Vendor

Q&A: Manish Agarwal of AXA Strategic Ventures Discusses Investing in Innovation