A San Francisco-based insurtech company with ties to Des Moines has received $33.5 million in investment capital from a group of insurers led by Principal Financial Group’s life insurance arm. The company, Limelight Health, will use the money for product development, customer acquisition, global expansion and hiring efforts related to its cloud-based health insurance quoting, underwriting and proposal application.

The series C funding was led by Principal Life, with participation from AXA Venture Partners, MassMutual Ventures, Aflac Ventures, Transamerica Ventures, Wells Fargo Strategic Capital, LaunchPad Digital Health and Wanxiang America Healthcare Investments.

Series C funding, as defined by Zacks Investment Research, is a company’s third injection of investment capital from outside sources and indicates its owners have convinced venture capital firms or other institutional investors that they have a viable business and the investors are generally encouraged about its long-term odds of success.

Principal’s investment will help to modernize the insurance quoting process for small to medium-sized businesses, said Kara Hoogensen, vice president of Group Benefits, U.S. Insurance Solutions at Principal, who will also join Limelight Health’s board.

“At Principal, we are committed to helping advance innovations that are laser-focused on solving real challenges for advisors, small and medium-size businesses and their employees,” she said in a release. “We are proud to be a leader in the insurance industry in offering Limelight Health’s impressive cloud-based enterprise software that will modernize the quote-to-enroll process while breaking down key barriers hindering 60 percent of SMBs from providing ancillary benefits.”

Also joining the board is Lerk-Ling Chang, who has 17 years of product development leadership at Guidewire Software, where she is currently vice president of Strategic Ventures, Corporate Strategy and Corporate Development Group.

Limelight said it will be enhancing its product features to include more automation, enhanced workflow, an underwriter certification program, as well as risk scores based on data sets for better underwriting.

The 5-year-old company has experienced significant growth. Over the last year and a half, Limelight Health’s recurring revenues per month grew 750 percent. In the past 16 months, the company more than doubled its head count from 45 to 110 employees, according to a release. It opened a Des Moines office in mid-2018, and now has seven employees and one contract worker locally.

Limelight Health has attracted some new key executives in that time, among them the former global head of sales for Guidewire Software, Pete Espinosa, who has joined the company as vice president of enterprise sales and alliances. The company also has hired as advisers former eBay chief information officer Bob Sanguedolce and Bob Gaydos, a seasoned employee benefits executive.

Limelight Health’s co-founder and CEO, Jason T. Andrew, said the funding will drive significant product enhancements.

“This round of funding gives us the capital to execute on our vision — creating a new standard for how products are created, underwritten, rated and presented to employers,” he said. “As we enter our fifth year, we’re thrilled to share that our users will begin to see a number of enhancements that will bring substantial efficiencies.

“The employee benefits industry has long been dominated by manual workflows, redundant processes and poor user experiences, but we’re rolling up our sleeves to help with modernizing and enhancing the infrastructure to create a much better user experience.”

To read a Business Record Q&A with Limelight Health’s CEO, click here (Insider).