Adminovate: after $125M exit in ’08, insurance software team tries to do it again

Center City software firm Adminovate wants to modernize the insurance industry and the team is hoping history will repeat itself.

In 2008, Chris Doggett and Chris Gali sold AdminServer, their decade-old Chester-based insurance software firm with more than 300 employees, to Oracle for $125 million. Three years later, after their non-compete expired, they realized there hadn’t been much innovation in the insurance market, said Adminovate spokesman Timothy McKenna, so they “got the band back together” to do it again.

In 2012, Doggett and Gali founded Adminovate, which builds enterprise software for insurance carriers. Out of their 30-person staff, 90 percent of them are former AdminServer employees, McKenna said.

Headquartered at 1818 Market Street (where iPipeline, another insurance software firm and also an Adminovate partner, just opened a satellite office), Adminovate’s software automates paperwork for insurance firms and allows customers to access their accounts through mobile apps. The company, which is completely bootstrapped, has one client so far. It was also recently named a “Company to Watch” by an insurance industry publication.

Doggett, 44, and Gali,  45, met as programmers working at AIG in Wilmington, Del.. They both live in Center City and have another business interest, one that’s much sexier than insurance: cocktails. After selling AdminServer in 2008, they opened up Rittenhouse Square’s Franklin Mortgage and Investment Co., one of Philly’s first speakeasy-style cocktail bars, and Fairmount’s Lemon Hill bar and restaurant.

Read more in a recent Inquirer profile here.