Nine Four Ventures is excited to announce its investment in Polygrade, which emerged from stealth and announced its $6.3m in funding alongside Construct Capital, American Family Ventures, Hustle Fund, and Room & Pillar. We could not be happier to be building alongside David, Eui, Kaustubh, and the team.
What Polygrade Does
Polygrade is an AI-native claims management platform for the warranty industry. It sits above a warranty company’s existing system of record – no rip-and-replace, no eighteen-month migration – and deploys specialized agents across the five stages of a claim: first notice of loss, triage, authorization, parts, and payment. The agents work inside rules each warranty company sets and escalate exceptions to people. Legacy warranty software records the claim, while Polygrade orchestrates everything around it.
For example: after a homeowner reports the AC is out, the intake agent takes the call over voice, text, or chat; the triage agent pre-diagnoses the failure and pulls the appliance serial and model before anyone is dispatched; the authorization agent checks the spend against policy coverage, claim history, and technician notes; the parts agent sources the component by whichever rule the client set. Five handoffs that were five phone calls are now handled by Polygrade, with any exceptions routed to a human for confirmation.
The Market Opportunity
Warranty claims sit at a valuable intersection of the built world between a homeowner, a technician, a part, and a warranty provider. A claim is the start of a chain that coordinates these parties. The claim process, however, can quickly become complex when a diagnosis must be made (accurately), coverages are unknown, parts need to be available (or ordered), and work needs to be tracked. Warranty providers live in a world of tight margins, pushed by the severity of a claim, cycle time, and cost to serve. Polygrade’s review of 44,500 warranty claims identified $13.6m in potential savings in this process – roughly $300 a claim – with over half traced to dispatches that never should have happened. Where a few points of loss ratio separate a good year from a bad one, that is material.
Why Now
The first reason is that claims work can be complex, and prior software and systems did not have the reasoning and technical capabilities of what AI has already unlocked. Diagnosing an HVAC failure from a homeowner’s description, matching a serial number to the right SKU across a large supplier catalog, and authorizing a repair against a policy is messy, high-consequence reasoning. Models could not do it reliably enough to be trusted near a live claim. Now they can – inside guardrails, with an audit trail.
The second reason is data. As claims move through, Polygrade compounds an intelligence graph across policies, claims, decisions, and outcomes, so what it learns at triage informs what it recommends at authorization. This data has historically not been captured or structured, and never layered on top of parts costs, availability, and repair time.
Why This Team
We’ve known David Steckel since the Setter days – the home management platform he founded, backed by Sequoia and acquired by Thumbtack, where he went on to build the home services partnership business. He then joined Sears Home Services as Chief Product Officer, and watched warranty claims break at scale from the inside. Eui Chung, co-founder and CTO, spent nearly thirty years at Sears and Transformco, most recently leading Sears Home Services’ AI transformation. Kaustubh Vongole, co-founder and Head of Product, ran fulfillment products and AI strategy across a network of more than 2,500 technicians. This is an impressive, experienced team who have been in the trenches together and know the players. In many built world industries, distribution is relationships, and we believe the team has them.
The Road Ahead
Warranty providers can be large, deliberate, compliance-heavy organizations, and pilots run into the existential challenges of compliance clearance, data access, priority shifts, and sensitivity around doing anything customer facing. Despite these initial hurdles, Polygrade is already live with Cinch, Fidelity, Elevate, and United – some of the most meaningful players in the industry – with the new capital now primarily dedicated to forward-deployed engineering.
Polygrade is building in an unglamorous category, with an operating team that knows exactly why it is unglamorous, with a wedge into a far larger set of claims markets that all end with something physical needing repair. Warranty never got its digital moment. We think this is it!