Seth is the founder of EverQuote and leads all business, strategy, and growth of the company. EverQuote is a free service that helps consumers compare car insurance quotes.
Early life and education
Seth Birnbaum was born on May 4, in New York. Birnbaum went to Stuyvesant High School. In 1996, Birnbaum earned a bachelor’s degree in engineering from Massachusetts Institute Technology.
Early career
After graduating from college, Seth Birnbaum co-founded NeoGenesis Pharmaceuticals and served as its vice president of systems engineering from 2001 until 2003. Schering-Plough, a US-based pharmaceutical company, acquired NeoGenesis in 2003. After the acquisition of NeoGenesis, Birnbaum co-founded Verdasys and served as the company’s CEO until 2010.
EverQuote
In 2011, Seth Birnbaum and Tomas Revesz, who met at Massachusetts Institute Technology, co-founded EverQuote, an online insurance marketplace, and lead generation service in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The company was a part of the Cogo Labs incubator program run by the Massachusetts-based venture capital firm Link Ventures. In 2013, the company moved to its own office space. On April 30, 2015, the company raised $1.6 million in a Series A funding round, with investors including Total Access Fund, Green D Ventures, and Alumni Ventures Group.
In May 2015, Vestmark CEO John Lunny and MicroStrategy founder Sanju Bansal became part of the board of directors. On October 4, 2016, the company raised $23 million in a Series B funding round, led by BrownSavano Direct Capital Partners. Existing investors included Total Access Fund, Green D Ventures, Alumni Ventures Group and new investors like T Capital Partners, Stratim Capital, Oceanic Partners, and Oceania Capital Partners also participated in the funding.
On February 22, 2017, the company received an additional of $13 million to its previous funding, led by Link Ventures and Second Alpha Partners. With existing investors included Green D Ventures, Alumni Ventures Group and other investors like Castor Ventures, and Blue Ivy Ventures also joined the funding round. At the same time, they added the CEO of Cogo Labs, Mira Wilczek, to their board of directors, where she replaced Jonathan Shapiro.
EverQuote has raised an overall amount of $37.6 million in four funding rounds.
The company began as a marketplace for car insurance, but it has since expanded to home and life insurance. The service produced by the company is matching insurance-seekers with companies that others with similar profiles preferred in the past. The company does not directly give quotes on insurance rates. Instead, it decides a few companies whose insurance products were bought by similar drivers in the past and gives those companies the insurance seeker’s contact information. The company representatives then will quote prices for the products they offer.
The service is free to insurance-seekers. As stated by the Boston Globe, “EverQuote collects referral charges from insurance providers when customers purchase policies, but it doesn’t permit companies to pay to be included in its recommendations.”
Advertising
In 2016, the company launched an Internet advertising campaign highlighting images of two young employees (not always the same two employees) with a caption such as how 2 math graduates are disrupting the insurance industry. This juxtaposition recommended to many that the young people in the photo were founders of the company.
In answer to a controversy over the ads, co-founders Birnbaum and Revesz said that the photos were meant to showcase a “young, diverse” team at EverQuote. In March 2017, the company stated that they had discontinued the advertisement. The company said that future advertisements would end confusion about the roles of the young employees pictured.
EverDrive app
In 2016, the company launched EverDrive, a new smartphone app to help drivers estimate their driving safety, based on five criteria: speeding, accelerating, phone use, cornering, and braking. Between 1/3 and 1/4 of drivers using this EverDrive app improved their safety skills, over a period of four months, to obtain better scores from the app.
Net Worth
As of February 28, 2019, Seth Birnbaum has an estimated net worth of at least $17.8 million. Birnbaum holds more than 34,000 units of EverQuote stock worth more than $7,414,000. Over the last few years, Birnbaum sold EVER stock worth over $10,173,816. In addition, Birnbaum produces $251,000 as a president, a co-founder, and a CEO and Director at EverQuote.