Root Insurance Co. plans to grow to nearly 550 employees and is moving its headquarters to the 80 on the Commons mixed-use building under construction alongside downtown's Columbus Commons Park, according to City Council documents.Just over two years old, the Columbus auto insurer offers paperless signup and management of a policy through a mobile app, which also measures driving habits so only safe drivers can enroll. The company sells online, eschewing agents, and its data-driven model results in big discounts on premiums.Root in March closed a $51 million venture capital round led by Redpoint Ventures, along with Scale Venture Partners and returning investors Ribbit Capital and Silicon Valley Bank Capital Partners, all in the San Francisco and Silicon Valley region. The company has "unicorn potential" – tech slang for greater than $1 billion in value – to grab a sizable portion of the $220 billion auto insurance market, Elliot Geidt, a Redpoint partner, said at the time.The company plans to lease 65,000 square feet in the 12-story office, retail and apartment building under construction at 80 E. Rich St., with a goal to move in October, according to a downtown office incentive before council. Daimler Group and Kaufman Development are partners in the $60 million, 350,000-square-foot project that completes the bookend of towers that border the park. The city's downtown office incentive would pay the company as much as $2.4 million over five years – half of income tax withholding on new jobs – while generating the same amount of new taxes for the city in that span. The agreement calls for retaining 79 jobs and adding 463 new positions, with salaries ranging from $35,000 in customer support (about 122 jobs) to $120,000 for less than a dozen data scientists. The largest single category is 189 software engineers, averaging $108,000 yearly. Payroll would total $47 million.The company also appears on Monday's agenda for the Ohio Tax Credit Authority, which does not release details until after its meetings. Both agreements are with Ibod Company Inc., a holding company for Root named by co-founder Ilya Bodner, who runs a different insurance-tech startup and no longer is involved with Root. Root plans to spend $1 million equipping and furnishing the headquarters, according to the city proposal. As of March, Root had 85 employees at 34 W. Gay St., so it's already created some of the new jobs.In its first nine states, Root had gross direct underwritten premiums of $4 million in 2017, according to filings with the Ohio Department of Insurance. It's now operating in 16 states, and is in the licensing process in more.Root's data-driven model and “superior product experience for consumers" set it apart, Redpoint's Geidt said in March.Co-founder and CEO Alex Timm started working as a teenager in his family's insurance business; his motivation was to create "honest" rates that use data to better project risk and don't spread the cost of bad drivers on safe ones. The app and analytics side is led by Chief Technology Officer Dan Manges, who also was founding chief technology officer of Braintree, an online payments company that PayPal acquired five years ago for $800 million. Root's first investor was Columbus-based Drive Capital LLC; the company has raised a cumulative $78 million in less than two years. Beam Dental, a fellow insurer in the Drive portfolio, this week closed a $22.5 million investment round from Silicon Valley VC giant Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.