View this email in your browser

Hello.

Well, that was a fortnight.

By rights I should be writing this from Chicago. I was due at the Reuters event this week, with a chonk of meetings lined up, but flights got delayed, then cancelled, and the trip had to come out of the calendar last minute.

To the Reuters team and to everyone I was meant to be seeing out there – genuinely sorry I couldn’t make it. I hope it’s a brilliant, busy, successful event, and I owe a fair few of you a coffee 🙏

Instead, I’m now just back from Stockholm.
(Via a couple of unexpected days in Amsterdam.)

And as for Stockholm. Just. Wow.
Everyone seems to live by the water, the sun barely sets, and every single person owns a boat. What a life.

Back at Sønr HQ, the conversations this week are BIG.

A Sønr fund (you heard it here first).
A venture-building studio.
And the one I’m really loving: taking everything Sønr does and standing it up on the inside of a major carrier as its own unit. Not advising from the outside but building from within.

Plus, there’s a ton of US work landing too, so we’re growing the team out there to match.

All super good.

Right. Enough about Sønr. Let’s get into what’s going on out there.

Prevention, front and centre

Prevention has been a slow-burn story for a few years now. With a lot of talk around it.

And whilst it’s not suddenly arrived, the last fortnight threw up a few examples worth weaving together.

The headline act is definitely Alan.

The French health insurer raised €480m, landing it at a €5.5bn valuation. That’s its ninth round, somewhere north of €1.1bn raised in total, and a valuation that’s jumped ~€500m in under three months.

Forget the number for a second. What I find interesting is how they frame this.

Alan doesn’t talk about selling health insurance. It talks about insurance, prevention, and care, all sat on one platform. And they talk about the tech doing a lot of the heavy lifting on underwriting and member engagement.

€800m of ARR.
Up 53% year on year.
Profitable in France.

Over in Australia, IAG went at the same idea from a different angle.

Through its Firemark Ventures arm it’s taken a strategic stake in Sonder, a 24/7 mental health, medical and safety platform.

The plan is to put that in front of customers during the worst moments – the floods, the fires, the major incidents – rather than waiting for a claim to land.

A few days later its WFI brand became the first to extend the platform to its farming clients and their families. For free. How good is that? A genuinely new approach given insurers have to date only provided Sonder to their own staff, not customers.

And in cyber, Mitigata raised a $15m Series B. India’s first cyber-only regulated broker, built around a promise: insure, detect, defend, recover.

Cover, prevention and response in one place. Three very different markets. Same instinct. Less ‘pay you when it breaks’, more ‘help it not break in the first place.’ I like it.

Distribution moves into the plumbing

For all the noise around shiny customer-facing tools, a fair bit of the smart money this fortnight went into the plumbing underpinning distribution.

Braven – an AI platform automating the back-office grunt work behind delegated authority – closed a $4.6m seed. Ex-Swiss Re CRO Matthias Weber was among the angels, which I always find an interesting signal (the senior industry practitioner investing, not just when Matthias does!).

I enjoyed the following one-liner from founder Carlos Chávez: the industry doesn’t have a product innovation problem, it has an infrastructure problem.

Braven is going after delegated authority – bordereaux, binder validation, all the spreadsheet-and-email graft nobody puts on a conference slide.

And it’s not a concept.
Over $800m of GWP is already running through the platform across seven countries, and they’re opening in London to take a run at the Lloyd’s market.

Bold first stop. And one that seems pretty sensible.

And then there’s Waniwani, which raised $8m. You might not know the name (albeit they’ve been doing the conference circuit recently so hopefully you do), but you’ll remember the dent it made.

This is the infrastructure behind the Tuio ChatGPT app – the one that wiped a good load off broker stocks back in February.

Their bet is that distribution is moving to AI and they’re providing an open-source kit that lets any quote-based vendor show up inside ChatGPT, Claude and the like, with a paid compliance and optimisation layer sitting on top.

Co-founded by Raphaël Vullierme of Luko.

Given where it sits in the chain, definitely one to keep an eye on.

And a smaller one that matters more than it looks.

Nassau Financial took a direct stake in Trussed AI, a governance and compliance platform for regulated firms putting AI to work. Not the sort of thing that trends. But as everyone wires AI into underwriting and claims, somebody has to make all of that explainable and auditable – and a few people are clearly starting to back the businesses that do exactly that.

Different problems, same direction of travel. The value quietly moving into the rails.

Buy, don’t build

Even in a world of vibe coding and maxed-out enterprise tokens, buy still seems to be the answer to the build-versus-buy question.

Belfius Insurance agreed to buy 100% of Insurlytech, the parent of French digital insurer Leocare.

It’s Belfius’s first move outside Belgium, and rather than build a French operation from scratch it’s bought a working one – 1.3m users, a well-liked app, teams who know the market. It all makes sense.

ReSource Pro went a slightly different route, picking up Flow Specialty‘s AI tech, IP and core team, and bringing in founder Sivan Iram to run a new “AI Factory”.

This is a services business choosing to buy capability outright rather than grow it slowly in-house. The tech takes the repetitive, high-volume stuff, the people keep the judgement and the relationships. Nice.

And Connie Health pulled off both at once – a $40m Series B and, on the very same day, its tenth acquisition, snapping up Clearlink‘s Medicare book.

The idea is that an AI-native platform can absorb and scale big books of business without the integration ever feeling like a bolt-on. The fact they’re buying as much as building is the interesting part – and if it keeps working, plenty of people will be taking notes.

Three deals, one common strategy.
When someone’s already built the thing, and built it well, buying beats starting over.

Cover for the robots

This one made me smile.

Zurich‘s Hong Kong arm teamed up with YAS to launch embedded micro-insurance for robots. Scenario-based cover – repair costs, third-party liability – dropped straight into the robotics sales journey.

Sounds niche but it makes sense.

A robot weaving through a busy shopping centre and one working next to a heavy plant on a building site are two completely different risks, and a one-size policy was never going to cut it.

What I really love is the idea of robots helping walk the customer through the purchase journey, and the purchasing being done by AI Agents on the buyer side. Maybe I’m getting carried away a little.

As more of this kit turns up in the real world, cover like this has to exist – and selling it at the point of deployment, where nobody has to remember to go and buy it, is the clever part. Another interesting space for embedded to play in.

That’ll do for the news.

Unfiltered with Matt & Nige
A couple of fresh Unfiltered episodes have landed should you not yet be subscribed:

Episode 13: Shipping is Easy, Adoption is Hard, Conference Season Edition
Episode 14: Corgi, Trillionaires, and the AI Reality Gap

Listen: Substack | Apple | Spotify

There’s so much good stuff in these.

Sønr 2.0
We’re steadily bringing more of you onto the beta and the feedback has been brilliant. Even the not-so-good feedback is incredibly valuable.

If you’re already in there, keep it coming – we’re shaping this thing with you, and it’s only going to get better and better. Keep an eye for a couple of new workflows dropping next week:

1. Thesis Reviewer – upload any investment thesis and it pressure-tests the case, checks the facts are accurate and current, profiles every named company, and surfaces others you might’ve missed.

2. Smart Watchlist – set the topics, sectors and companies you care about, and it tracks them weekly or monthly, telling you what’s moved and, crucially, why it matters to you.

If you’re not on the waitlist yet and fancy a look, jump in here: sonr.global/2-0.

Next week I’m in the UK, then over to Zurich followed by Madrid. If you’re out that way and fancy grabbing a coffee or a beer, give me a shout – I’d love to say hello.

And the usual ask. If you’re at a carrier, reinsurer or broker and you’d be up for exploring how Sønr could help, do get in touch. It genuinely makes my week.

Right. That’s me.

Big love, and have a great weekend.

Matt

Ps Huge thanks for all the Hyrox messages. Not a win for team Connolly/Conger but we put it all there (in the zillion degree Strawberry Arena). Next year, Hong Kong 👊🏻

If you’re not a SøNws subscriber, sign up here: https://sonr.global/sonws/
Or catch the podcast: https://lnkd.in/eCmJ9tVy
Not a Sønr customer yet? Take a look: https://sonr.global/

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.