When Shift received its Series D investment round, I started getting a lot of the same question, “So, what are you going to use the money for?” I understood why people were asking me. It’s an important accomplishment, and naturally, I was proud of the hard work, from so many different people, that helped make Shift a company that people wanted to invest in. But at the same time, equating a new round of funding to the work my team and I were already doing wasn’t something I had been thinking all that much about.
I was busy talking to our clients about their needs and how they were thinking about the role artificial intelligence could play in their businesses. I was meeting with our product development teams to collaborate and share the information I’d received from our customers. I was doing all of this with one goal in mind. Ensure our products are exactly what our clients want and need.
Sure, getting a lot of money is great. It’s rewarding to see your efforts pay off. But the investment needs to be viewed through a different lens. It’s an exciting milestone, but it certainly isn’t the end of the journey.
From day one, Shift has been all about innovation. It’s a priority for all of us, and the company already reinvests approximately 50 percent of its revenue into the R&D function. We’ve used those resources to build an award-winning fraud detection product. We’ve used them to help insurers use AI to automate the claims process with confidence. And now we’re using them to build out the Shift Insurance Suite and give our customers even more opportunities to use AI across the policy lifecycle.
So for me, this latest round of funding is an important way Shift can fuel our innovation engine. Insurance is a business of processes. It’s a business of decisions. Removing friction from those processes, and helping insurance professionals make amazing decisions will drive incredible transformation in the insurance industry. This is an exciting time to be in InsurTech. Insurers around the world have a tremendous appetite for adopting new technology and approaches that can help them improve operationally while at the same time deliver exceptional customer experiences. And Shift is in a perfect position to help them achieve their goals.