New wins, new partners, and more.

Happy Friday folks ?

With Matt C out in Oz the role of CSO (Chief SøNws Officer), falls to moi – Matt F.

As ever it’s been a busy one – both here at Sønr and in the world of insurtech, so let’s get started.

Friends Down Under.

Matt C’s currently over in Oz for a few weeks catching up with our friends Down Under. Obviously it’s brilliant to catch up with the teams at QBEV and Insurtech Australia, but there’s also the small matter of continuing the truly global perspective for the Beyond Boundaries report.

Make sure to drop him a line if you fancy a coffee (or a Hyrox workout?).

? New Client Alert ?

OK, it’s been a little while coming, but we’ve got an announcement to round out the week…

(drumroll please)

Aviva is officially a new client – hooray!

And it’s all sorts of brilliant.

Aside from being a household name, what’s interesting for me is the intent. You’ll have seen the business feature in SøNws a number of times as the organisation evolves and really pushes for growth.

So, as you can imagine we’re absolutely buzzing to play a part in what comes next.

“Sønr’s ability to deliver real-time market intelligence, track the latest developments, and connect us with the right tech companies globally will be invaluable as we accelerate the innovation already underway across Aviva.”

If you’d like to know more, you can check out the press release here.

An amazing set of teams to work with, a fantastic culture to gel with and a lot to do. Love it.

Speaking of work, I suppose I’d better get on with some. So, what about the news?

Well, given the number of client meetings, presentations, talks, projects and coffees in the past fortnight, this all comes through the lens of a lot of practical discussions.

So let’s take a look at what that means in relation to the news.. with terrible puns, naturally.

The voice of change.

Customer service has been a recurring theme of late – what it looks like today, what it’ll need to look like tomorrow and what’s going to enable that.

Hyper-personalised, infinitely scalable, and able to infer need and respond in real-time were all terms that featured heavily in those discussions (obvs).

AI is the go-to acronym of course, and agentic capabilities in particular. The market seems to think so too, with 50% of Y-combinators’ latest cohort focussed on agentic AI.

But, two things really stood out:

• There’s a whole load of tech serving adjacent markets with relevance
• The perceived value of companies that are truly AI-native

So, first up is Stitch, who announced a very healthy $3m seed round. They’re focussed on providing insurance-specific AI agents out of the box and/or build, deploy, and govern agents tailored to their operations. Check ’em out – they’re proudly built from the ground up.

Last but not least is Gradient Labs who has raised $13m. They’ll be focussing the cash injection on enhancing their AI platform, focusing on automating customer support and operational processes across payments, lending, insurance, and wealth management.

As exciting as this stuff is, I’m really interested in what we can do with it once we’ve got familiar with automating existing processes (as valuable as they are!) and start reimagining stuff entirely.

Planes, Trains and Automobiles

Maybe there’s something in the water, but there’s been a tonne of auto news recently, and beyond headlines on Elon and the rise of Chinese EV manufacturers.

We’ve got product launches, partnership, new market entry, growth and a birthday to celebrate:

100K written policies annually. 100% revenue growth in 2024. The headlines and the unit economics behind them perhaps make it unsurprising that UK-based embedded player Wrisk have announced a $12m Series B. Congrats all round.

From embedded to short-term insurance Cuvva we go. See what I did there?

Some more stellar performance stats to celebrate with Cuvva announcing 300% YoY growth in profits, 60% of customer queries handled entirely by AI, and 5m+ app downloads. Really encouragingly, this growth looks sustainable with cost control and loss ratios both looking strong. It’s a combo that investors pay attention to in this market…

Not to be outdone, Inshur has hit the headlines twice in quick succession.

Firstly, they’ve announced a partnership with insurance payment reconciliation and distribution specialist Diesta. Great news.

Right, off to the world of ridesharing super apps we go…

Grab is no stranger to insurance, and neither are its users – they’ve had partnerships with Chubb and ZhongAn for years. They’ve announced launching a motor product in Singapore for themselves. Super interesting. It’s a complex old business to move into, although at least market access shouldn’t be an issue! Definitely one to track with interest as the implications for the future could be massive.

Finally, a big fat happy birthday to Lemonade – the insurtech posterchild has just turned 10 years old. No mean feat for any new business, but feels like they’ve weathered a lot of time in the limelight. Either way, they’ve done what any awesome business does on its birthday – expanded its car insurance and launched in Indiana. Nice.

Cyber friends.

The cyber market’s been a busy old place for some time now, and something we’ve been tracking for a number of clients, and Zurich has been hogging the headlines.

A few weeks back it was with the announcement of their partnership with Cowbell to launch a co-branded SME insurance offering in the US.

Now they’re back, this time announcing that after a long-standing relationship with BOXX, they’re going all in. The wholesale acquisition of the SME and personal cyber specialist was announced last week and marks an ongoing theme of consolidation in the insurtech market as top talent gets snapped up. Given the direction of travel in the market, the need for BOXX’s solutions and creativity is unlikely to go away, I guess there’s more than a million customers that attest to that, and Zurich has had a front-row seat along the journey.

A special(ty) kind of partnership.

Sometimes it feels like we don’t share enough news from the world of Specialty. Especially given our work with Lloyd’s Lab, LMA & Limoss, Chaucer, and a bunch of others we’ve sworn to secrecy about (for now).

Putting that to rights is news from industry stalwarts, Descartes. Typically this is around their parametric offering, but this week’s news comes from their insurance subsidiary who are set to expand and diversify their offering to include Credit and Political Risk. It’s a big move and sees Hélène Martin, former Head of Single Risk, Credit & Political Risk – France at Coface, take the reins.

Speaking of industry stalwarts, ACORD has been in the news too. This time it’s with the (brilliant) team from mea. The partnership will see mea platform’s technology integrate with ADEPT, ACORD’s global data exchange platform – enabling insurers to receive more structured data via API, improving downstream processes and increasing automation. This is a very good thing.

Possibly the biggest news (if not for its scarcity) is from the team at MS&AD Ventures (is it me or is there a marked up-tick in their announcements of late?). They’ve announced that specialty insurance marketplace platform (and portfolio company), Accelerant are going to IPO.

As you’d imagine, there’s some pre-requisite impressive growth stats – not least a 217% compound annual growth rate in Exchange Written Premium since inception.

This is definitely one to celebrate at both teams – congrats to all on an exciting milestone on the journey.

The rest and some of the best.

Ok, clocks ticking and the sun’s shining – let’s get a wriggle on.

Leaf focusses on automating insurance and pension advisory and broker services for businesses. The startup has raised €1.7m in its first funding round to further develop and scale their platform for SMEs in Denmark who get a complete overview of their insurance and pension setup, along with ongoing recommendations to reduce risk or optimise pricing. Nice.

Hmm, predictive, pro-active, streamlined… if you were going to paint a picture of the future of insurance, it’d probably look like this, right? One to watch.

I’m not sure what part of the ‘Wefox’ thriller we’re on now, but they’ve announced a new fundraise this week. The total’s €151m, albeit it’s €76m and some debt refinancing, but marks another step in Joachim Müeller’s role as chief ship-steadier. After some pretty hefty changes, they seem to be claiming that with the funding onboard they’re on track to be profitable again by the end of 2025. Given the backstory it seems a bold statement, but let’s hope it translates.

Right, that’s it.

Time to do some other stuff and prepare myself for my 4-year-old’s ‘graduation’ from nursery.

I’m not sure whether this is now ‘a thing’ or whether I’m getting old (or both).

Either way, I’m hoping (praying) there’s a cold beer to accompany the 30+ degrees and a sugar-fuelled nursery…

Until next time, friends.

Matt (F) ✌️

Make smarter decisions with AI-driven market intelligence.

Sønr helps (re)insurers around the world explore market trends, track competitor activity, and scout and assess best-in-class tech companies.

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