Crazy amount of activity across the leading Insurtechs

A few years ago I set up a business with my brother.

It went pretty well, for the first week. At the end of the second we agreed we shouldn’t have set up a business together.

As it was a tech business he suggested I build it and he’d step back and concentrate on his other non-tech companies. He then put all this down in writing and sent it over. The last paragraph mentioned something we hadn’t discussed, that he’d retain 50% of the equity.

You’ve gotta hand it to him for trying.

I was reminded of this recently when asked to be a judge for the UK Digital Experience Awards.

In addition to reading of each award entry (they kindly suggest you allow 45 minutes per entry), you’re asked to attend a full day of judging and encouraged to use their logo on your email signatures, LinkedIn and Twitter.

And, after a lengthy call to ‘qualify your credentials’, they put it all down in writing. The last sentence read:

As you might have guessed, I won’t be judging.

Insurtech Top 100 – Quarterly Update
Hopefully you’ll have seen the leading Insurtechs 100 we compiled for leading insurtechs Post back in April. If not, check it out here (behind the paywall) or shout me and I’ll send the list over.

Tapping into Sønr’s new watchlist feature (which is bloody brilliant I might add) we’ve pulled together updates on the top 25 (check the Insurance Times for a full update).

leading Insurtechs

A few highlights below:

$57 million secured across 3 ventures:
Both Alan, the digital health insurance platform and Atidot, the predictive analytics tool for the life insurance industry received Series A funding, both gaining further contributions from their Seed investors. The third investment, into Simplesurance – the ‘plug & play’ e-commerce insurer, was a Series C to aid their expansion into new markets, with Japan the first country in its crosshairs.
92% (or 23 out of the top 25) now have Series A or above funding, highlighting an ever-increasing market maturity across leading Insurtechs
6 new product launches including a couple of standouts:
Neos’ smart home insurance offering was bolstered by its partnership with leak detection software specialists HomeServe, and Acko’s partnership with Indian ride-hailing unicorn Ola provides a platform for the insurer to offer in-trip insurance cover to riders.

The other big news is Oscar Health, the New York-based full-stack health insurer valued at $3bn, posted its first-ever profits alongside the announcement of plans to expand to several more US states next year.

I’ll be speaking in Lisbon next week alongside Mario Schlosser, Oscar’s CEO and hope to get a little more on their forward strategy. Watch this space.

Interview with Doorda: data-driven new business innovation
We’re big fans of Doorda who we first met at a Partnership Day we ran for a client last year.

Starting out as community news site it wasn’t long before the pivot into a data business; now tracking and extracting data from several thousand sources.

With the objective to offer access to petabytes of cleansed data via a single login, Doorda cleanse, index, join and serve their data via an API or as a hosted service. Handy for those businesses looking to augment their own data.

Oh and for those of you who aren’t data folk, a petabyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. The prefix peta indicates the fifth power of 1000 and means 10¹⁵ in the International System of Units (SI). I hope that clears that up.

Check out our interview with Clifford McDowell the Founder and CEO of Doorda.

Want to know who the next Airbnb or Uber will be?
A few years back I was asked the above question so frequently, each time not knowing the answer, that I decided to do something about it. I set up Tällt.

The theory was that if we track where the smart investors are spending their billions, maybe just maybe, that’ll give us an insight into the business/consumer/tech trends that will be hitting the mainstream in the years to come.

And if we then assess those companies receiving the investment on the core factors to startup success (which roughly boils down to the people, the product and the market potential) we might just be able to spot the next generation of Ubers.

With this logic we went on to publish Disrupt 100.

The 2016 listing was good. 2017 was incredible:

The 2017 alum have received more than $3.9bn in disclosed funding from major investors such as Google, Sequoia Capital, Goldman Sachs, Bessemer Venture Partners and Tencent Holdings. (maybe make this clear it’s since last D100, similar to next bullet?)
The top 3 ventures alone have raised more than $1.35bn in disclosed funding since last year’s index was launched.
Two have been acquired; Lattice Data was acquired by Apple for $200m, whilst Mezi was acquired by American Express in an all-cash deal estimated to be worth $125m-$150m.

If you’ve not come across Disrupt 100 yet, the 2018 listing will be out on Wednesday. Go check it out.

leading Insurtechs

That’s it for this week. Have lovely weekends all.

Matt

—
MATT CONNOLLY
Founder & CEO

+44 7788 711 104
www.tallt.ventures

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Crazy amount of activity across the leading Insurtechs

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