Continuing My Family’s 144 Year Old Legacy — Introducing InsurGrid

Our Journey.

Ever since I was a little kid, I was working towards becoming an entrepreneur. Though my first business was a comic book and skate shop, I thought it was as real as it gets by printing business cards that said, “Chase Beach — Entrepreneur.”

After graduating from Wittenberg University, I knew San Francisco would be the right place to jumpstart my career. Who wouldn’t want the opportunity to work in the world’s technology epicenter, with the smartest brains and the most opportunity.

I spent the past 4+ years working at early stage startups while meeting as many people as possible. I’m proud to say I was part of the team that sold the world’s first industrial exoskeleton system. I traveled to 16 countries and sold exoskeleton systems to the largest companies in the world from Boeing to Ford.

But, after traveling to 53 cities across 16 countries, and working relentlessly to launch a hardware product, I knew it was time to drive towards my own destiny. It was time that I got in the driver seat to set out on the path to do what I dreamed of when I moved to San Francisco.

At the same time this was going on, my mom opened up her own insurance agency. She was carrying on the 144 year old legacy my family had in the insurance space. This inspired me to dig deep into my family roots and learn more about my family’s expertise in insurance. In 1876, my great great grandfather TB Beach started an insurance agency in Catskills, New York. Ever since, my family has been in the insurance industry. My father on the life insurance side, my uncle on commercial — the list goes on. After revisiting my family’s insurance-roots, I realized the way we buy insurance hasn’t changed since my great great grandfather — good ol’ TB Beach.

I started obsessing over how technology has changed the banking industry. How open data created game-changing opportunities for banks, technology companies, and consumers. Data accessibility is something the insurance space desperately needs. I didn’t understand how consumers could connect their bank accounts to Venmo but couldn’t connect their insurance provider to receive a competitive quote.

I started talking to my parents about the problems insurance agents have collecting prospect information, how the insurance space is disjointed, and the lack of proper regulation around insurance data. I wanted to validate my hypotheses to see whether this was speculative or reality. I spoke to hundreds of insurance agents, software companies, and thought leaders in the space.

Through these conversations, I’ve come to learn how there’s over 1.1M insurance agents and they represent 92% of insurance policies issued in the US. While these large D2C InsurTech companies are spun up, these insurance agents are not going to be replaced overnight and no one is focused on enabling agents to be successful online. I realized there’s a massive opportunity and decided to dive in head first.

During this time, I met Charles Michael. He’s midwest born and raised, and a true 10x hustler. He started advising me on the idea while I validated proof of concept. We always joked about how we would both go all-in on this some day. Fortunately the stars aligned and he joined me full-time as my co-founder.

InsurGrid was launched on March, 19th 2020. We have raised capital from angel investors, built and launched our solution, and acquired our first paying customers.

Obviously Charles and I wouldn’t have expected launching our first startup together during a pandemic. Though the current landscape has presented certain challenges, we’re very thankful not to be impacted as much as other startups. In some respects, insurance recession-proof and believe the current climate greatly strengthens our value to help agents bring more of their business online.

In light of everything going on in the world, we’re not letting the current market climate slow us down. We have an air tight strategy and have full faith in our ability to succeed. We’re actively raising capital, acquiring customers daily, and extremely focused on our strategy.

Thank you for everyone who has helped me get here. It’s been a crazy ride since moving out to San Francisco and would have never imagined the help I’ve received along the way.

Welcome to the world, InsurGrid.