We outgrew our name: ProPay is now Polygrade

When we started this company, we set out to fix one thing. Contractors doing warranty work were not getting paid fast enough. Invoices sat for weeks, a price got disputed, a field got filled in wrong, and there was no clear path to fix any of it. Good contractors noticed, and they took their calendars to direct-to-consumer work, which pays faster and comes with none of the friction. We initially built for that problem, and we named ourselves for it: ProPay, a payments name for a payments problem.

We were right about the problem, but soon learned there was a much bigger problem to solve.

Slow pay is real, but it is the last visible symptom of a claim that has gone sideways much earlier, at dispatch, at authorization, at parts. And the more warranty companies we sat with, the more one thing stood out: none of this is a care problem. These are serious operators running real P&Ls with real actuarial discipline, and they want to do right by the homeowner. They are simply operating blind in three places at once, and every one of those is a tooling problem, not a judgment or effort problem.

You can see it in the numbers they do not have. Most were not tracking cycle time, because no system made it easy. They were dispatching blind, with no status from the field until a customer called to complain. Almost none could tell us their fully loaded cost to serve. 

The best way to improve claims operations is to take on the entire thing, end to end. And we are up for the challenge. 

It changed what we were building, and it changed what we should be called. A payments name could not carry a company built for the entire warranty claims lifecycle. So we gave it a name that could: we are now Polygrade.

Let me walk you through where we have been, where we are going, and how we landed on the name.

What actually breaks in a warranty claim

A warranty is a promise, and that promise is not kept in software. It is kept in the physical world: a technician at a door, a part shipped across the country, a compressor replaced, a home made whole. The claim is the only moment a customer truly experiences what they bought, and the outcome is binary. They renew, or they leave.

For decades, the intelligence behind that promise has lived in people. In the dispatcher who knows which provider to trust, the parts lead who knows which supplier delivers, the adjuster who carries years of judgment about severity and cost in their head. That is real, hard-won knowledge, and today it is trapped: in tribal memory, in tickets, in spreadsheets, in handoffs. Every handoff loses context. Every undocumented decision is something the organization can never learn from.

That is the problem worth solving. Not moving invoices faster, but getting that judgment out of people's heads and into the claim lifecycle itself.

What we're building for warranty claims operations

The warranty industry has never had real infrastructure. Insurance has a full stack: Guidewire for the claim, Verisk for the data, Xactimate for the estimate. Warranty got none of that. So every carrier has stitched together its own patchwork of policy systems, ERPs, and ticketing tools, with people holding it all together.

Polygrade is the layer that has been missing. We take the operational judgment of a claims organization, how to triage, when a repair becomes a replacement, which parts strategy protects margin, when to escalate and when to wait, and we make it digital: encoded as clear rules, applied consistently to every claim, auditable end to end, and improved with every outcome. Best-in-class judgment applied not just to the exceptions that fall off the happy path, but to every claim, every time, as the new baseline.

That is a different thing to build than another feature, and it drastically changes the economics once it exists. Adding a parts supplier stops being a multi-year integration and becomes a configuration. Adjusting an operational flow stops being a ticket queue and becomes self-serve. The heavy lifts happen once, and everything after gets cheaper, faster, and safer.

We built it this way because we lived the other way. Our team spent years on the operator side of the largest platforms in home services and warranty, on the receiving end of the systems this industry runs on. We felt every failure point firsthand, which is also how we knew, earlier than most, that the payment problem we started with was a symptom and not the root cause.

The meaning behind our new name: Polygrade

We treated the name the way we treat everything else, as something to build on purpose.

Poly is one of the most productive prefixes in the language, and it keeps serious company: polymer, polygon, polyglot. It shows up in chemistry, mathematics, and engineering, and it almost always signals structure, scale, and precision. Grade is a standard nearly every industry has claimed except this one. Education has it. Materials science has it. Finance has investment grade. Warranty, a category that lives and dies on judgment calls about severity and quality, never had a standard of its own to point to. That absence was the opening.

Put together, Polygrade reads instantly, the way "upgrade" already does, but nobody owned the combination in our category. It says what we do: apply one graded standard across every claim type, every supplier, and every operating model, at whatever scale a carrier runs. There is a second layer we liked just as much. Poly sits one syllable from policy, the unit this entire industry runs on. Every claim traces back to one.

That is where our tagline came from too: warranty-grade intelligence. The judgment in a claims decision should be held to the same bar as the industry it protects.

Where we are and where we’re headed 

We are not describing something we hope to build. We are live with enterprise warranty carriers today, in production, processing real claims, with supplier and service-provider networks that are live and growing. Every claim that runs through the platform adds to an outcomes dataset that gets harder to replicate the longer we run.

From here the surface area grows and the direction holds. Automation stays staged, and carriers set the pace: it starts as an advisor that surfaces a recommendation, becomes a co-pilot that proposes the action, and, for the decisions a carrier trusts it with, becomes autopilot that executes and routes only the exceptions to a person. Every recommendation carries its confidence and its reasoning, and nothing moves outside the thresholds a carrier sets.

Fixing the root cause matters for the whole industry. When the claim works better at the center, everyone around it rises with it. The pro who gets authorized and paid faster earns more on warranty work and gives more of their calendar back to it. The supplier who connects once, instead of integrating with every carrier separately, competes on service and speed. The warranty company lowers severity and cost to serve. And the homeowner, the person the whole promise is for, finally gets what they paid for. Fix the operation for one carrier and you have not just lifted a single boat, you have raised the tide the entire industry floats on.

Home warranty is where we started, because it is the hardest version of the problem: claims on equipment with no record of its age or condition, underwritten blind. The same shape shows up in extended warranty, OEM warranty, and equipment breakdown coverage, and further out, in anything where a claim ends in a physical repair or replacement. The through-line never changes: less intelligence trapped in people, more of it running as infrastructure that gets smarter with every claim it touches.

A warranty is a promise. Polygrade is the foundation that keeps it.