Advocate Technologies, a New York company that builds pricing and coverage benchmarks for commercial insurance, launched publicly on 4 August 2026 with $18m in seed funding.
The investors named in the press release were Vestigo Ventures, Brewer Lane, MetaProp and select family offices. The release did not name a lead investor or a valuation, and Dealroom's report on the round did not name investors either.
The company had operated in stealth since 2020.
“Every major market has gone through a transparency event that enables practitioners to better serve customers.”Ashwin Agarwal, CEO and co-founder, Advocate Technologies
What Advocate does
Advocate says it offers the first standardised pricing and coverage benchmarks for commercial insurance. Its AI engine, the World Insurance Model, reads unstructured policy documents and converts them into a standard format. The company says its data covers $7.3bn in premiums across 70,000 policies.
The platform supports policy servicing, proposal generation, coverage analysis, portfolio-wide gap assessment, carrier appetite insights and carrier pricing. Advocate says it flags coverage gaps and premiums that can run more than 100% above market averages.
A product called Market Terminal provides pricing benchmarks and coverage comparisons across portfolios, with compliance tracking for more than $1.3tn of commercial real estate assets. Weekly market data is published through the Advocate Insurance Desk, a 30-minute pricing recap.
The company says users can sign up and start using the platform without speaking to a salesperson.
Who it is for
The release lists independent brokers, commercial lenders, loan servicers, commercial property owners, risk managers and asset owners as users. It does not name customers. Sign-up at advocate.app takes under 60 seconds and requires no sales call, according to the company.
Ashwin Agarwal, chief executive and co-founder, told Digital Insurance in an interview published after the launch that commercial insurers charge widely different prices for similar coverage, and that he attributes the gap to a lack of data transparency rather than differences in risk. He said whoever builds that trusted, transparent pricing layer first sets the terms for the industry.
The team
Agarwal founded the company with Dimitris Psaropoulos, the chief technology officer. David Haddad is head of product engineering. Advocate is headquartered in New York City, with offices in Prague and Athens.
Psaropoulos said the company built Advocate to turn the industry's institutional memory into data. Haddad said the hard part was turning judgment into something structured, repeatable and comparable across the market.
The release does not give a headcount.
Dealroom's profile of the company lists $25m raised in total, which does not match the $18m seed round, and the report does not explain the difference.
What the money is for
Advocate did not say how it will spend the seed funding. Agarwal said in the release that every major market has gone through a transparency event that enables practitioners to better serve customers, and the company is positioning itself to be that event for commercial insurance.
Company website: advocate.app