When disaster strikes a home, the insurance claim that follows is one of the most consequential financial events a family will navigate. Nearly 1 in 20 American households files a claim each year, at an average claim of roughly $18,000, and the outcome can be the difference between repairing a home and walking away from it. The professionals who could help maximize a settlement — public adjusters and claims attorneys — typically take 10 to 20% of the total claim proceeds and decline the smaller losses that can destabilize working families. Yet only 24% of households earning under $25,000 have enough savings to cover three months of expenses, versus 75% of those earning $100,000 or more. After a natural disaster, the households with the least margin for error are left to face the system alone.
Cameron and Aaron Mooney founded Tugboat to help the everyday family. We recently invested as part of Tugboat’s $3 million seed round. Here’s why.
A consumer advocate in your pocket
Cameron and Aaron bring years of deep industry expertise and on-the-ground experience to Tugboat. Cameron, Tugboat’s CEO, spent more than five years adjusting complex commercial and residential claims. Aaron, the COO, spent nearly four years as an independent property adjuster when he was one of only a handful who worked in the entire state of North Dakota. They have seen from the inside and the day-to-day where the process breaks down for everyday people — the information asymmetry that shapes denial patterns, adjuster behavior, and final settlements — and built Tugboat to put that insight on the policyholder’s side of the table.
The idea for Tugboat crystallized during a seemingly ordinary conversation. Cameron asked Aaron: “if you could spend a few more hours with each client, would you recover more on the claim?” The answer was an immediate yes. An adjuster’s hours don’t scale, but software does, and Tugboat delivers that extra attention to every policyholder at once, a consumer advocate in your pocket rather than a luxury reserved for the largest losses. When Cameron recounted this story during our first in-person meeting at Porto’s, a Los Angeles family spot frequented by many immigrants in the community, we were convinced Tugboat was the right fit for our portfolio.
That advocacy runs on a data flywheel trained on proprietary claims intelligence — adjuster emails, denial letters, carrier responses and patterns, settlement outcomes — that sharpens with every interaction. The early results are striking: across an initial cohort, Tugboat users recovered roughly $40,000 on average, nearly three times the standard outcome.
Filling a pressing need
The need Tugboat addresses is urgent and it’s compounding. As climate volatility intensifies and disasters grow more frequent and severe, LMI households are disproportionately concentrated in the most exposed geographies with the least cushion to recover. At the same time, the public safety net is not what it once was, with proposed FEMA cuts and tightened disaster-declaration criteria narrowing what’s available after a catastrophe. Tugboat is deploying directly into that widening gap.
And Tugboat lived up to that promise before it was ready. When the Eaton Fires devastated Los Angeles in 2025, Tugboat — still pre-launch — made its platform free for impacted families and helped many recover more than they would have alone. A company’s instinct in a crisis says a lot, and Tugboat’s was to show up.
Our first investment in insurtech
Tugboat is Acumen America’s first investment in insurtech, and it fits squarely within our financial inclusion portfolio, complementing our work across wealth-building, financial services access, and financial education. Property damage is among the most consequential financial shocks families can face; a serious loss can mean prolonged displacement, catastrophic financial setback, and lasting instability. Tugboat extends professional-grade claims expertise to the people who have historically been priced out of it.
Our participation in the $3 million round will fund product development, team growth, and go-to-market across both direct-to-consumer disaster response and embedded partnerships with multifamily property managers, lenders, and financial institutions. We intend to put our network in affordable housing and community financial health to work, and help Tugboat become the brand families trust in their most vulnerable moments.
With Tugboat, the difference is measured in real dollars that help people at the worst possible time. For an LMI family, the gap between an underpaid claim and a fully recovered one can determine whether they repair their home, avoid predatory loans, and stay housed. That is the kind of impact we strive for.
- Yichen Feng, Amon Anderson, and Meaghan Gamboa
.png){kind=logo}
