Embroker Helps Axon Optics See the Light When Buying Insurance

The Client

Axon Optics is a high tech startup that creates specialized eyewear to help people who suffer from photosensitive migraines. In the company’s ongoing mission to offer better treatment options, Axon constantly invests its profits towards continued research and product development.

The company was formed by a neuro-ophthalmologist, a photonics researcher, and Ben Rollins, an ophthalmic entrepreneur who has previously founded multiple technology companies.

Issue

If you ask Rollins about insurance, his attitude mirrors what you would expect to hear from most tech startup founders; insurance is not something anybody ever wants to worry about, until they need it.

“We’re required to have insurance because we have a licensed technology,” Rollins said.

At this stage of growth, Axon Optics only needed to buy a basic business owner policy (BOP) with general liability and property insurance. This, according to Rollins, was all the more reason to expect a quick turnaround when purchasing the insurance, although he remembers that not being the case when trying to buy insurance for another company of his several years ago.

“We had to get insurance and I was like, ‘I have to talk to people?’ I felt like it was really antiquated,” he said. “I remember after signing up I got a 100-page packet and I just thought, ‘Why do I need this?’”

The Journey

Rollins knew exactly what he wanted from his insurance experience; it needed to be fast, easy, and online. Those requirements are what led him to Zenefits and then to Embroker when the two companies partnered in 2017.

“What I’ve liked about Embroker is just being able to log on, take care of it really quickly, and not have to worry about it again. It takes me 5-10 minutes to fill everything out, and that’s it, the rest is taken care of,” Rollins said.

Results

It’s hard to overstate how important convenience and ease are to Rollins and the majority of tech startup founders like him when it comes to buying business insurance for their startups.

“Insurance is just not on the top of my mind, building my company is. I want insurance taken care of and I want it taken care of quickly,” he said.

Asked how much communication he has had with our brokers, Rollins told us that there hasn’t been much interaction at all, which is just the way he likes it.

“We interacted when I needed to buy added insurance for a clinical trial, that’s it. If I’m all set, I don’t need to chat to anybody,” Rollins said.

As someone who is immersed in the tech world, another common problem he sees in most insurance companies is that many of the interfaces that he has had to interact with looked as if they were stuck in the past, adding that he wants his dashboard to look like it was built “now” and “not in 2005.”

“I’ve worked with traditional insurance brokers before, but they all seemed unnecessarily dated. Embroker has given the insurance industry a much-needed makeover that transforms something I always considered monotonous and dull into something streamlined and simple,” Rollins concluded.

Now that you have a better understanding of how Embroker helps tech startups get insured intelligently, you may be wondering how all of this affects your business and where to go from here. If you need more help or information, you can reach out to our team of expert brokers. Or, if you prefer to get started on intelligent quotes, create your Embroker account today.