EverQuote is an online insurance marketplace founded in 2011 and based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Description

EverQuote began as a marketplace for car insurance, but it has since expanded to home, health, and life insurance. The service provided by EverQuote is matching insurance-seekers with companies that others with similar profiles preferred in the past. EverQuote does not directly give quotes on insurance rates. Instead, it selects a few companies whose insurance products were bought by similar drivers in the past, and gives those companies the insurance-seeker's contact information. The company representatives then will quote prices for products they offer. The company's revenue model is

lead generation In marketing, lead generation () is the initiation of consumer interest or enquiry into products or services of a business. A lead is the contact information and, in some cases, demographic information of a customer who is interested in a spec ...

. Its service is free to insurance-seekers. According to the ''

Boston Globe ''The Boston Globe'' is an American daily newspaper founded and based in Boston, Massachusetts. The newspaper has won a total of 27 Pulitzer Prizes, and has a total circulation of close to 300,000 print and digital subscribers. ''The Boston Glob ...

'', "EverQuote collects referral fees from insurance providers when customers buy policies, but it doesn’t allow companies to pay to be included in its recommendations."

History

EverQuote was founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts, by Seth Birnbaum and Tomas Revesz, who met at

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the mo ...

. Originally named AdHarmonics when it began in 2008, the company changed its name to Everquote in 2011, after creating its online insurance marketplace. EverQuote was a part of the Cogo Labs incubator program run by the Massachusetts-based venture capital firm Link Ventures. In 2013, the company moved to its own office space. In May 2015,

MicroStrategy MicroStrategy Incorporated is an American company that provides business intelligence (BI), mobile software, and cloud-based services. Founded in 1989 by Michael J. Saylor, Sanju Bansal, and Thomas Spahr, the firm develops software to analyze i ...

founder

Sanju Bansal Sanju K. Bansal is an Indian-American businessman, the co-founder of MicroStrategy, a worldwide provider of enterprise software platforms for business intelligence (BI), mobile software, big data and cloud-based services. He served as the compa ...

and Vestmark CEO John Lunny became members of the board of directors. In October 2016, EverQuote received $23 million in Series B funding via Savano Capital Partners, Stratim Capital LLC and Oceanic Partners, and T Capital Partners. In 2017, Everquote added $13 million to its previous $23M funding. At the same time, they added Mira Wilczek, CEO of Cogo Labs, to their board of directors, where she replaced Jonathan Shapiro.

Advertising

In 2016, EverQuote began an

Internet advertising Online advertising, also known as online marketing, Internet advertising, digital advertising or web advertising, is a form of marketing and advertising which uses the Internet to promote products and services to audiences and platform users. ...

campaign featuring images of two young employees (not always the same two employees,) with text such as "How 2 math grads are disrupting the insurance industry." This juxtaposition suggested to many that the young people in the photo were founders of Everquote. In response to controversy over the ads, co-founders Birnbaum and Revesz said that the photos were meant to showcase a "young, diverse" team at EverQuote. In March 2017, Everquote stated that they had paused the ads. Everquote said that future ads would end confusion about the roles of the young employees pictured.

EverDrive app

In 2016, EverQuote launched a new smartphone app called "EverDrive" to help drivers measure their driving safety, based on five criteria: phone use, speeding, accelerating, cornering and braking. Between 1/4 and 1/3 of drivers using this app upgraded their safety skills, over a period of four months, to earn better scores from the app.

References

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External links