A founder of InsurTech By Miles has raised £800,000 pre-seed funding for new venture Swallow.
Founded in 2022 by Callum Rimmer, Swallow separates pricing from code to improve the speed and confidence of creating and updating pricing models.
The round was co-led by Connect Ventures and Jigsaw VC and will accelerate product development, customer acquisition and business development at the no-code Software as a Service platform.
Financial pricing models – such as those used in insurance, credit, mortgages, financing, leasing and memberships – have, and continue to be, designed in spreadsheets and published through in-house custom code or legacy enterprise software.
Code is often intertwined with back-end systems and requires the help of technical teams to push changes live, meaning even simple pricing changes can often take weeks, instead of hours.
Swallow aims to empower pricing professionals to own their pricing operations without needing any developer input. With Swallow, pricing model changes can be done in minutes and served to millions of customers with complete confidence. Swallow is a new workbench platform that orchestrates end-to-end pricing operations which can sit apart from other code concerns.
Swallow is offering its SaaS platform as free-to-use, a radically different approach in an industry dominated by expensive legacy enterprise solutions, many of which cost hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.
“In my previous role as a CTO at a fast-growing InsurTech, I’ve seen first-hand how unnecessarily complex and time-consuming it can be to push a simple price change live,” said Rimmer.
“Whether it’s due to disjointed collaboration, poor back-end systems or simply fighting with other tasks to get to the top of the priority queue, pricing operations all over the world are using platforms and processes that slow them down, introduce errors and ultimately cause their businesses to lose money by making the wrong decisions.
“We’re redefining the pricing operations category with our new platform. We believe the product speaks for itself, so pricing professionals can use it to implement, optimise and test pricing models for free.
“Unlike a legacy enterprise solution, companies can switch to us with minimal hassle and cost, improving the speed and confidence of pricing changes for greater growth and profitability.”
Rimmer launched Swallow in 2022 following his departure from pay-by-mile car insurance provider By Miles, which was acquired by Direct Line Group in April 2023. He had helped scale the business to over 100 employees, with hundreds of thousands of policies sold and over £25 million in investment.
Rimmer says that it was during his tenure with By Miles that he recognised the often difficult and slow process of managing pricing changes.
“At By Miles, I was involved in designing and delivering pricing for a range of different insurance products, across multiple underwriting partnerships. We repeatedly ran into the same issues around communication, approvals, testing, implementation and publishing. These issues made pricing release cycles take days, when the decisions could be made in hours.
“We’ve spoken with hundreds of pricing professionals, and the vast majority have problems with some aspect of financial pricing operations. Pricing issues are the same the world over, and we believe there is a huge opportunity by introducing better pricing operations into many different types of businesses.”
Rory Stirling, general partner at Connect Ventures, added: “The faster a business can get pricing changes to market, the faster they can impact their bottom line. Swallow makes the pricing process quicker and easier for the people driving these decisions.
“On top of this, their free-to-use, product-led approach is unique in the category. Swallow empowers teams to start making efficiency gains instantly, which is really exciting.”
Swallow’s waitlist is now open for exclusive early access to its pricing platform.
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