California-based insurtech Ladder has secured $100 million in Series D funding in a round led by Thomvest Ventures and OMERs Growth Equity. The company, which brands itself as the first, fully digital life insurance company in operation, will use the new capital to fuel further innovation in accessible, affordable life insurance solutions. The investment will also enable Ladder to expand its team, with a goal of more than doubling its workforce in 2022.

“I know first hand how life insurance can change a life,” Ladder co-founder and CEO Jamie Hale explained. “With our carrier in operation and this new round of funding, we are in the position to greatly accelerate innovation in service of families and communities. I am so excited to see our original vision continue to materialize.”

Ladder offers insurance customers flexible term coverage that can be set up in minutes and save policyholders up to 40%. With coverage of up to $8 million available in all 50 states, Ladder leverages an all-digital infrastructure and real-time underwriting to innovate at every step of the life insurance experience – from acquisition and product design to UX, instant issue, and policy administration. In its funding announcement, Ladder highlighted the fact that this week’s investment comes on the heels of 4x revenue growth in 2020 and in advance of its goal of issuing $30 billion in LadderLife coverage by the end of this year.

“Jamie Hale and his visionary management team are building Ladder into an innovative, market-leading digital life insurance company,” Saar Pikar, Managing Director and fintech lead at OMERS Growth Equity, said. “We are very pleased to count Ladder as OMERS Growth Equity’s first direct fintech investment – as well as our entry in the insurtech space, expanding on the insurtech presence established by our OMERS Ventures colleagues. We believe that the company offers a truly transformative approach, including through its efficient adjudication of risk and enhanced user experience.”

Founded in 2015, Ladder has raised a total of $194 million in funding. The company was named to Fortune’s Best Workplaces for a second year in a row this year and, this summer, appointed eight-year LinkedIn veteran Sanjeev Kapur to the newly created role of President.

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In a round co-led by Alpha Edison and Morpheus Ventures, fintech-as-a-service platform Rize has secured $11.4 million in Series A funding. The company, founded by Justin Howell and Kirk Voltz six years ago as a B2C fintech firm, has since transitioned into a B2B platform dedicated to “making fintech infrastructure simple, accessible, and ubiquitous for all financial builders.”

The investment takes the Arlington, Virginia-based company’s total funding to $13.4 million.

Writing about the investment on the company’s blog, Howell put his company in the same cohort as fintech innovators – and Finovate alums – like Plaid and DriveWealth. These firms, like Rize, started out as consumer plays, but developed into fintech infrastructure companies as their understanding of challenge of “building intuitive financial user experiences” grew. Realizing that there was more to enhancing the user experience in financial services than UI/UX improvements, Howell and the Rize team concluded that the underlying financial infrastructure was the problem and Rize’s “uniquely flexible approach” could be part of the solution.

Rize’s platform leverages Synthetic Account technology to enable banks, fintechs, and brands to build a wide range of financial account types ranging from checking and savings accounts to brokerage, FBO, and business accounts. The technology also supports quick and secure money movement options including ACH and wires, as well as mobile check deposit and physical and virtual cards.

This summer, Rize unveiled its Developer Toolkit, which enables innovators to build a prototype financial services application in less than 30 minutes. The toolkit features a comprehensive suite of technologies – a self-service sandbox, a launchpad, a software development kit (SDK), a command line interface tool (CLI), and a boilerplate app – designed to help developers both focus on the core elements of their solution as well as get their solutions to market as quickly as possible.

“When we set out to become the best-in-class fintech infrastructure platform, we knew that meant heavily investing in the developer community,” the company said in July when the toolkit was launched. “Our mission is to get clients to market faster, with less effort – and that begins with not only providing great documentation, but creating tools that enhance our builder’s experience and significantly cuts down on development time.”

In today’s funding announcement, Howell said that the funds raised in the Series A would enable Rize to continue innovating on its core solutions, including its Developer Toolkit. The new capital will also support other initiatives such as improving the Rize Admin platform, UDAAP monitoring, and security systems. The funding will also support the launch of new offerings including brokerage accounts and new crypto and credit-related solutions.

In addition to Alpha Edison and Morpheus Ventures, Rize counts Raptor Group, Revolution’s Rise of the Rest Seed Fund, Third Prime, Red & Blue Ventures, Graham Holdings, Walkabout Ventures, and Rucker Park Capital among its investors.

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