Ascend

The story of Ascend begins with two entrepreneurs, Andrew Wynn and Praveen Chekuri, who first crossed paths at Instacart. Their initial venture together, Sheltr, a home maintenance platform, caught the eye of insurtech unicorn Hippo and became its first acquisition in 2019. This experience within the insurance world illuminated a significant, yet overlooked, challenge: the industry's financial infrastructure was archaic and fragmented. Legacy systems, manual processes, and a reliance on paper checks created a clunky, inefficient experience for both insurance distributors and their customers. Wynn and Chekuri saw a clear opportunity to apply their tech-forward mindset to modernize this critical aspect of the insurance ecosystem.

In 2021, they founded Ascend, a platform born from the conviction that insurance payments didn't have to be so complicated. Their mission was to build the financial operating system for the insurance industry, a single, unified solution to handle the entire payment lifecycle. What started as an idea to streamline premium financing and collections quickly evolved into a comprehensive platform automating everything from invoicing and premium collection to commission distribution and carrier payables. By tackling the 'picks and shovels' of the industry—the foundational, yet under-innovated, payment infrastructure—Ascend set out to empower brokers, MGAs, and carriers. The company's vision was not just to introduce efficiency, but to enable these businesses to offer a modern, seamless digital checkout experience that today's customers have come to expect, ultimately allowing them to focus on their core competencies of underwriting and distribution rather than getting bogged down in financial operations.