Toronto’s Zensurance, a startup offering curated commercial insurance packages for startups, has raised $1 million in seed cash. The round was led by Montreal’s Ferst Capital Partners, with participation from Montreal investors Portag3 Ventures (of Power Corp).

Zensurance is using artificial intelligence (AI) to reinvent the process of taking out a commercial policy, likely at the expense of brokers.

“It doesn’t need to be this complicated,” Zensurance’s CEO, Danish Yusuf, told Insurance Business’s Lucy Hook.

“Most small business owners have to fill out and fax 10-page forms, wait weeks and pay by cheque to get insurance. We are very excited to bring transparency and digitization to such an important industry,” said Zensurance’s CEO, Danish Yusuf.

Yusuf, a former engineer at IBM, is building a ‘pricing engine’ that can change the way small businesses can apply for and purchase commercial insurance. He told Insurance Business that typically small businesses have experienced frustration applying for a business policy.

“Our thinking is the small business owner is really underserved,” he told the website. “If you’re looking for less than a $5,000 policy, many brokerages won’t even touch the policy because they lose money in the first year based on all the manual work that goes into it.”

The company plans to use the funding to hire new talent and build its business. It recently won Ryerson DMZ and BMO’s “The Next Big Idea in FinTech” competition.

Zensurance was also named one of the Top 20 Innovative Technology Companies of 2016 by the Canadian Innovation Exchange.

“We are a technology company building helping small business customers get the best insurance coverage, purchased at their convenience, at highly competitive rates,” said CTO Sultan Mehrabi.

“We see an enormous opportunity to re-imagine the way in which insurance is distributed to businesses by leveraging technology,” said Dominique Ferst, Managing Partner at Ferst Capital Partners. “Yet innovation in the commercial insurance industry, until now, has been largely unaddressed in Canada. The founding team at Zensurance has the experience, vision and customer focus to address and take a leading role in this transformation.”

Ferst Capital Partners is a Montreal-based investor and studio that houses and incubates several fintech startups. Meanwhile, Portag3 Ventures of parent company Power Corp, is also sponsored by IGM Financial Inc. and Great West-Lifeco Inc.