Profiling Herald — One API Across Many Insurance Carriers

Herald is a small surface — 7 APIs — but it’s one of the more structurally interesting entries in the insurance vertical, because the whole point of the design is to make many carriers look like one. It’s the aggregation pattern that transformed banking, applied to commercial insurance.

What’s actually in the surface

The 7 APIs describe a single quote-and-bind pipeline:

• Applications API — create an application and submit it to carriers. The entry point.
• Quotes API — receive normalized quotes back across carriers and lines of business.
• Products API — carrier products and appetite: who writes what.
• Classifications API — the normalization layer over the tangle of industry and risk classification codes.
• Distributors API — the agencies and brokers doing the distributing.
• Files API — the documents (applications, policies, supporting files).
• Webhooks API — async notification when a carrier’s quote comes back.

What’s interesting about the shape

1. It’s an aggregation layer, not a product. Herald doesn’t underwrite anything. Like Plaid over banks, it sits in front of a fragmented landscape of carriers and exposes one normalized contract. The value isn’t a feature — it’s the translation.
2. Classifications is the hard part, made explicit. Commercial insurance is a mess of overlapping classification systems, and Herald gives normalization its own dedicated API. That’s the unglamorous integration work that the aggregation model lives or dies on, promoted to a first-class surface.
3. The flow is async by necessity. You submit an application, carriers respond on their own time, and the Webhooks API tells you when a quote is ready. The surface models the real-world latency of insurance rather than pretending quoting is synchronous.
4. Seven APIs is exactly enough. There’s no padding here — Applications, Quotes, Products, Classifications, Distributors, Files, Webhooks is a complete, minimal decomposition of “quote across carriers.” Small surface, high coherence.

The takeaway

Seven tightly-scoped APIs is what an aggregation play looks like when it’s modeled well: one clean contract over a fragmented supply side, with the normalization work (Classifications) surfaced rather than hidden. The pattern to borrow — the count of APIs isn’t the measure of a surface; coherence is. Herald does more structural work with 7 APIs than many providers do with 70. Walk it on the Herald provider page.