The collapse of accelerators (and tech billionaires?)

Hello all.

This week Elon Musk wipes $14bn off Tesla’s value and names his baby X Æ A-12.

In a world where I’m currently deciding between letting my wife cut my hair or wearing a cap for Zoom meetings, I’m not sure I’ve the mental bandwidth for Elon’s madness.

Welcome to a SøNws Thursday special.

As I’ve remembered it’s a bank holiday in the UK tomorrow (as opposed to not knowing what day it is), I thought I’d get some market news down.

A couple of things that caught my eye this week:

Death of the accelerator?
For a few years now, I’ve been hearing grumbles about the lack of ROI from insurtech accelerators – both from corporate partners (/investors) and the startups taking part. That said, the accelerator model has played an important part in building our Insurtech accelerators ecosystem, none more so than the Hartford Accelerator.

For now, if your objective is to source, from a global market, the best innovation aligning to your greatest needs/opportunities, there are smarter ways to do that.

Nationwide has left the building
I appreciate that for many life in lockdown is tough. There’s a hunger to reconnect with friends and family, explore the world and get back some of our old ways. But you know what, whilst I share all that, some of those old ways weren’t too great either.

The Stockholm-based company is one of Europe’s largest digital health care providers, facilitating 1.8 million consultations to date. By comparison, its somewhat better-known competitor Babylon, has racked up over 2 million consultations.

Unsurprisingly, there’s also been a fair bit of automotive news recently, in particular around telematics.

The IMS team has launched a usage-based insurance program model for North American insurers, enabling the implementation of a mileage-based UBI product in just a matter of weeks. Well done guys.

And in the UK, AXA Insurance has teamed up with Brightmile to offer fleet customers the Brightmile app for free for 3 months. A good taster I guess, and it’ll be interesting to see how the commercials play out post-trial.

To kick things off, it’s got to be the Bought By Many fundraise of £78.4 million (~$98 million). For a UK Insurtech that is huge. I’m happy for them, and so is my dog.

Also, a couple of big rounds for Israeli tech this week.

Safe driving company Nexar, founded by a couple of former Yahoo-ers, has raised a $52m Series C. And Otonomo, an auto-data SaaS solution, has raised a $46m Series C.

I’ve always been fascinated by Otonomo. It analyses a reported 2.6bn data points daily from its global network of 18m connected vehicles, offering insights that can help bring new auto services to market. The bit that interests me is they provide an alternative to handing data over to the tech giants, who as you’d expect, are doing their best to monopolise the market.

And a little market news to wrap thing up…

The good and bad from the past fortnight
Great to see Swiss insurance and re-insurance group Helvetia announce that it will pay 50% of BI claims for restaurants and hotels not covered by state support. This is in spite of a pandemic exclusion in customer policies. Hats off Helvetia.

In the UK, LV= has followed in Admiral‘s footsteps, offering refunds to its auto customers. Well done team LV=. £30m has been set aside to offer refunds of £20-£50 to eligible direct car and motorbike insurance customers.

And in the not such great news, RBS has shut down its challenger bank Bó and AIG has culled its ‘insurtech’ Blackboard.

I’m not that surprised by Bó – the writing has been on the wall since it launched 6-months back. The Blackboard decision, that’s an interesting one. If anyone knows the reasons behind it, I’d be keen to hear more. I assume they were struggling to monetise it, coupled with getting hit by a whole world of Covid-19 related costs?

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Three things to call out before I disappear:

1. Innovation Reports
We’ve spun up a couple of super interesting reports over the past couple of weeks:

• Building the future of telehealth
• Accelerating digital innovation in response to Covid-19 (this isn’t hosted anywhere so email me if you’d like to read it…which you really should)

2. Insurtech 100
We’ve just submitted this year’s Insurtech 100 to Swifty and the accelerators team over at the insurance Post. An incredibly interesting list, with over third new entrants. More on this next time, but drop me a line if you’d like to receive a copy when it’s published.

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Right time to enjoy an escape from lockdown and take my dog for his one walk of the day.

For those with long weekends, enjoy. Until next time.

Matt

Sønr is a world-leading market intelligence platform created specifically for the insurance sector. It is used by small and large insurance companies, around the world, to accelerate corporate innovation.

It provides intelligence on market trends, competitor playbooks and disruptive tech companies globally. It also has a number of features that help you track and manage scouting activity across your organisation.

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