The Toronto company that turned quote, bind and pay for small-business commercial coverage into a single API - and now treats carrier reliability like a factory floor.
Commercial insurance is one of the oldest industries on the planet, and one of the least programmable. Buying a policy for a coffee shop or a contracting crew has traditionally meant forms, faxes, and a broker waiting on a carrier. Briza set out to replace that waiting with a single line of code.
Founded in Toronto in 2016, Briza built what it billed as the industry's first unified API for small-business commercial insurance. Instead of an agency or a software platform integrating separately with each carrier - a months-long slog per insurer - Briza offered one integration that reached many. Through it, a distributor could request an instant quote, bind the policy, and take payment for lines like business owner's policy (BOP), general liability (GL), workers' compensation (WC) and cyber.
Underneath, Briza connected to carriers' automated underwriting models and normalized their differences: different questions, different appetites, different data formats. To the developer calling the API, it looked like one clean, predictable interface. To the business owner at the end of the flow, it looked like a checkout.
Over time, the company narrowed. Its public positioning today is blunt and unglamorous: "API reliability for insurance carriers." The pitch - stop losing premium to slow integrations and submission errors - reflects a hard-won observation that in insurance, the demo is easy and the integration is where deals quietly die.
That shift, from a broad marketplace ambition to a focused reliability tool, is the throughline of Briza's story. The plumbing turned out to be the product.
Briza's product line reads like a company that kept following the same problem deeper - from selling insurance, to routing it, to making sure the routing never breaks.
A unified, API-first platform for instant quote, bind and pay across multiple carriers - BOP, GL, WC, cyber and more - through one integration.
Software-enabled rating that lets agencies and brokers compare quotes from multiple carriers' automated underwriting models side by side.
Coverage offerings dropped into vertical SaaS and AI platforms, letting adjacent software products sell insurance without becoming insurers.
An engineering-led offering that reduces failed submissions and downtime, applying manufacturing discipline to carrier API connectivity.
Briza does not sell to the coffee shop directly. Its customers are the layers above: insurance carriers, managing general agents, independent agencies, brokerages, national wholesalers, and - increasingly - vertical SaaS and AI platforms that want to offer coverage inside their own products.
For a distributor, the problem Briza solves is time and error. Building and maintaining a direct integration to each carrier is expensive, and every mismatched field or timed-out request is a quote that never converts. For a carrier, the same failures show up as lost premium and frustrated partners.
By standing in the middle with a normalized API and a reliability discipline around it, Briza aims to make both sides' lives measurably less brittle. The company reports a workforce of roughly 110 people, and has spoken publicly about growing live carrier integrations toward a target of around 30.
The through-line: Briza's buyers are people who live and die by whether an API call succeeds, and who would rather pay someone else to guarantee it does.
Plenty of companies route commercial insurance quotes. Briza's distinguishing move was to treat reliability itself as the feature - and to borrow the language of manufacturing to do it.
The company names its engineering blog the "Last One Percent Blog," a tell about where it spends its attention: not the happy path that works in a demo, but the edge cases that fail at scale. Its materials reference Six Sigma and Kaizen - factory-floor methods for driving out defects - applied to carrier API connectivity.
That framing sets it apart from platforms that emphasize breadth of appetite or slickness of interface. Briza's argument is that in insurance integration, correctness and uptime are the moat. A quote that arrives fast and never errors is worth more than a longer list of carriers that sometimes times out.
It backs the posture with credentials that matter to risk-averse buyers: a U.S. patent (No. 12,388,588) and SOC 2 Type II certification, signals that its security and process are auditable rather than aspirational.
Co-founder and former CEO. Two decades in the insurance industry, with time at global carriers, before setting out to modernize commercial distribution.
Co-founder and Executive Chair. Best known as a co-founder of FreshBooks, one of Canada's landmark SaaS companies.
Co-founder and CEO. Rose from chief technology officer to the top job, steering the company through a restructuring and its reliability refocus.
Briza's DNA blends deep insurance domain knowledge with SaaS engineering culture - a combination that shows up in a company comfortable talking about both underwriting appetite and expression-evaluation libraries in the same breath.
Briza raised about $11M USD (roughly $13.9M CAD) across two rounds, backed by a mix of insurance veterans and tech investors.
| Round | Amount | Date | Notable backers |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seed | $3M CAD | Feb 2020 | Mike McDerment, Sid Sankaran, Alon Neches, Sharon Ludlow, Louis Beryl, 500 Startups |
| Series A | $10.2M CAD (~$8M USD) | Oct 2020 | Investment Group of Santa Barbara (lead), 500 Startups |
Figures per public reporting (BetaKit, Crunchbase, Coverager). Amounts approximate; CAD/USD as reported at the time.
Briza sits in the infrastructure layer of insurtech - the connective tissue between carriers that underwrite risk and the distributors and software platforms that sell it.
The broader small-commercial API space includes players like Bold Penguin, Semsee and Tarmika, alongside carriers' own direct APIs. Briza's differentiation within that field is less about being the widest marketplace and more about being the most dependable pipe.
As "embedded insurance" moves from buzzword to expectation - coverage offered inside the software a business already uses - the value of a reliable, normalized carrier API grows. Briza's bet is that whoever owns that reliability owns a durable position, regardless of which front-end app happens to win.
Briza's platform enables insurance companies to tap into adjacent platforms through embedded finance.
Stop losing premium to slow integrations and submission errors.
Ben Munro, Mike McDerment and team launch Briza to modernize commercial insurance distribution.
Backed by insurance and tech angels plus 500 Startups.
Investment Group of Santa Barbara leads a $10.2M CAD round to scale carrier integrations.
Briza expands live carrier APIs toward a target near 30 and grows its engineering team.
CTO Rishi Sharma becomes CEO after the prior CEO departs; the company restructures.
Repositions around carrier API reliability, citing a U.S. patent and SOC 2 Type II certification.
The "Last One Percent" blog highlights reliability work and open-source projects.
Briza has integrated automated underwriting from established commercial insurers into its API.
Video: search "Briza insurance API demo" on YouTube for product walkthroughs and founder interviews. No official channel was confirmed at publication.