Exclusive: Investors bet $40 million on Honeycomb's no-inspection landlord insurance AI | Fortune
04 Jun 2026 10:56 UTC - by Lily Mae Lazarus
The startup’s automated underwriting engine ingests hundreds of data points per property to price its policies.
➤ Honeycomb is profitable and aims to reinvest earnings into growth, targeting a market segment within commercial real estate insurance.
➤ The company utilizes an AI-powered underwriting engine that analyzes hundreds of data points per property to offer insurance at a lower cost than traditional carriers.
➤ Honeycomb Insurance, an AI-native insurer for apartment buildings, has raised $40 million in new funding, bringing its total to $95 million.
Itai Ben-Zaken might be one of the only insurance tech founders who doesn’t need investors’ money—but he’ll still take it.
He’s the CEO of Honeycomb Insurance, an AI-native insurer specializing in apartment buildings and condo associations. The company raised a $40 million funding round led by Zeev Ventures, Fortune learned exclusively. Ibex Investors, Peakline, Alpha Partners, Meitar Partners, Practical VC, and NFL Super Bowl champion, former 49ers player Harris Barton also joined. The raise brings total funding to $95 million—a figure that is deliberately modest, according to Ben-Zaken.
Honeycomb’s platform ingests hundreds of data points per property—geospatial datasets, aerial imagery, building history—to price each risk individually, without a physical inspection. That lets the company offer coverage up to 40% cheaper for well-maintained buildings that traditional carriers either overcharge or pass on. Its customers are the landlords, condo associations, and HOA boards managing multi-unit residential housing.
“We’ve created a machine that can deeply assess risk at almost zero variable cost, and it’s continuing to learn,” Ben-Zaken told me.
The company ended 2025 with $275 million in gross written premium (the total volume of insurance premiums a company books), covered more than $100 billion in total insured value across 22 states, and is already profitable. “We are cash flow positive,” Ben-Zaken said. “But just like Amazon in the early days, everything we generate in profit we’re thinking about how to funnel back into building something bigger.”
Ben-Zaken, a Wharton MBA and Israeli military intelligence veteran, cofounded Honeycomb in 2019 alongside CTO Nimrod Sadot. The company came together after Ben-Zaken’s first startup, Comprendi, went under—felled by competing against Google and Meta. The lesson he drew: find a market that’s large, fragmented, and one where legacy players are competent but technologically vulnerable.
U.S. commercial real estate insurance fit the bill. The U.S. multifamily insurance segment alone is worth over $34 billion a year. About 30% of Americans live in apartment buildings or condos, yet major insurers have largely retreated from the segment after getting burned by weather-related losses. The ones that stayed have a blind spot: when you’re writing a $5,000 policy, you can’t afford to send someone to inspect the building—so a well-kept 1970s walk-up and a crumbling one down the street get priced the same.
But the market that gave Honeycomb its opening is becoming crowded. Commercial property premiums climbed for six years, peaking near 20% annual increases in 2023, as carriers spooked by natural disaster losses pulled back capacity and raised prices. That retreat let a company like Honeycomb in the door. Now the dynamic is reversing. A quieter 2025 hurricane season and an influx of new capital into the reinsurance market—the backstop insurers buy to cover their own catastrophic losses—has pushed rates down 5% to 15% for apartment building coverage, with reinsurance costs falling 6.7% in 2025 alone.
Ben-Zaken argues Honeycomb has a different lever to pull. “In a soft market, you play more on the elements that are less related to price,” he said. “The fact that an agent can sell five policies from Honeycomb in the same time as one policy elsewhere—that’s still an advantage.”
Ben-Zaken’s benchmark is Neptune, the flood insurer that went public last October at a roughly $2.8 billion valuation on around $400 million in gross written premiums (GWP). “On the GWP side, we’re not very far from them,” Ben-Zaken said. “We’ll cross $500 million in the next couple of years. At that scale, I think we’ll be in the right zone.”
See you tomorrow,
Lily Mae Lazarus X: @LilyMaeLazarusEmail:lily.lazarus@fortune.com Submit a deal for the Term Sheet newsletter here.
Joey Abrams curated the deals section of today’s newsletter.Subscribe here.
VENTURE DEALS
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PRIVATE EQUITY
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EXITS
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IPOS
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FUNDS + FUNDS OF FUNDS
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Categories rationale: The article focuses on an insurtech startup (Honeycomb) that uses AI for underwriting and pricing insurance policies for real estate properties. This aligns with 'Infrastructure Providers' as it discusses a platform enabling a specific type of financial service, and 'Scalability' due to the discussion of growth metrics like gross written premium and market expansion.Characteristics justification: The article reports on a significant funding round and the company's profitability and growth, indicating positive sentiment. The focus on a specific company and its innovative approach suggests moderate relevance. The novelty is relatively low as it's a funding announcement for a known company, and staleness is also low due to the recent publication date.Tag relevance: The tags highlight the company name, its core business (landlord insurance, AI underwriting), the financial event (funding round), and key metrics (GWP), which are central to the article's content.asset-types: others
rwa: false
entropy: 0.15
sentiment: 0.6
staleness: 0.2
relevance: 0.8
uncertainty: 0.1RWATimes slug: fortune-exclusive-investors-bet-40-million-on-honeycombs-no-inspection-landlord-insurance-ai-fortune-442626412