CoverTree: an InsurTech for better kind of manufactured home insurance

The success story of building an InsurTech digital product from scratch to raise 10M USD in seed funding

Team Augmentation

UI/UX Design

AWS

Node.js

React.js

TypeScript

Forewarned is forearmed. The residents of modular homes in the United States who have purchased an insurance policy using the Covertree – platform we are developing – are aware of this. However, the project had to go through a bumpy road of change to make this possible.

Building from scratch to raise 10M USD in seed funding

The client came to us in May 2021 with a code quality that is unacceptable to us. We offered him to start cooperation with writing an application from scratch.

Today the product is already available on the market. It gains a rapidly growing popularity (raised USD 10M in seed funding in September 2022) and is currently available in selected US states. But the plan is to conquer them all! However, it will not be possible without adjusting the product to technical and legal requirements and taking into account the climatic conditions of a given region.

Challenge

Building such a product from scratch is not simple. In fact, it is very difficult in terms of business logic and requires involvement in the entire process of software development. Understanding the whole product context plays a key role here.

In order to build a product of such quality and at such a pace, it required us to engage outstanding engineers with frontend, backend, and full-stack competencies.

Thanks to this, the product is distinguished by the high quality of the code written in TypeScript. From the frontend side, we used React with the most popular tools such as Redux, React Testing Library, Lerna, MUI, GrpphQL.

The infrastructure is developed based on the AWS Cloud Development Kit using the most popular AWS services – eg AppSync, DynamoDB, Cognito, S3, Amplify, SES, SNS.

Solution

We are working on the development of several related applications at the same time. Each of them is responsible for specific tasks. We do it together with the client’s team, which has three developers on their side.

From the front-end perspective, the project had to be configured so that each application was consistent in terms of design. For this purpose, we decided to use monorepo, in which we defined a component library shared by all applications. The main advantage of this approach is scalability and ease of use. You don’t have to repeat the code and it makes building new views much faster.

From the back-end side, we have to deal with security, reliability, scalability, as well as optimization of system maintenance costs. For this purpose, we decided to use the serverless architecture in the AWS cloud. Thanks to this approach, we do not have to worry about managing or servicing runtime environments and we can focus on providing functionalities necessary for the operation of the business. We use the AWS Cloud Development Kit with the use of TypeScript to model cloud resources.

So far we have managed to deliver two applications that are available to the user. The first one allows you to buy a policy; it can be accessed from the marketing page at this address. After entering the data, click the “Get a Quote” button, thanks to which the user is redirected to the target application.

The second application allows you to submit a claim and is available directly at this address.

There are new challenges ahead of us

In the near future, we plan to refresh the code of the web application by separating the presentation layer from the data transport layer.

Another application is on the horizon, allowing users with policies purchased to file claims for events covered by insurance – ie theft, flooding, fire, etc. In the future, an administration portal and a portal for insurance agents will also be implemented. They will be able to manage policies and reported claims from the application level.

We plan to build user application views based on API responses, and this is largely already underway.