FinTech news in insurance category
Kuila said PhonePe never held any stake in Zopper, and the startup, which counts Tiger Global among its backers, continues to be supported by its early backers and new investors. Zopper currently has presence in over 1,200 Indian cities and has partnered with over 150 players in the industry, including retail group Amazon, ride-hailing startup Ola, retail chain Croma, phonemaker Xiaomi, Japanese conglomerate Hitachi, and Equitas Small Finance Bank. He said Zopper is initially aiming to first reach nearly $1 billion in revenue, and over the course of about five years it will file for an initial public offering. That business, an API platform for insurance infrastructure, said on Tuesday it has raised $75 million in new funding.
Baldwin describes Boundless Rider as a standalone motorcycle, e-bike and power sports product that can be purchased directly from the company or eventually, bundled with another carrier’s homeowner or car insurance product or purchased through a manufacturer at the time of purchase. CoverTree CEO Adarsh Rachmale – who left his product management role at LinkedIn to focus on building the insurtech with Rishie Modi and Divyansh Sharma – says the goal of the company is to only focus on pre-fab or manufactured home residents. As of 2019, about 10% of new single-family homes (including manufactured homes) were categorized as manufactured homes. Boundless Rider is a new insurance company founded specifically to serve riders of motorcycles, e-bikes and power sport vehicles.
Arrenda, a Mexico City-based fintech company, is offering digital financial services to the real estate market of Latin America and closed on $26.5 million in a pre-seed round of equity and debt.
Ranger will launch in the fall, and offer home insurance, auto insurance and a home warranty policy that it is underwriting itself as an MGA — in other words, the startup won’t be carrying the risk itself, but partnering with a carrier for its own policies. Ranger is today announcing the close of a $5.25 million seed round led by Lerer Hippeau Ventures, with participation from Alex Rodriguez, Firstminute Capital, Slow Ventures, Global Founders Capital, Raven1 Ventures and, of course, Montauk Ventures. Garrison spent 15 years in the insurance business (at AIG) and saw how neglected agents are at legacy insurance companies. Rather than spend a ton on marketing, Ranger is focused on giving agents (who are boots on the ground in the communities they serve) tools to respond more quickly to customers, generate better leads, maximize cross-sell to other products and personalize client services.
Pazcare, a Bangalore-based employee benefits and insurtech platform, announced today it has raised $8.2 million led by Jafco Asia, bringing its valuation to $48 million. Pazcare currently offers health, term and accident insurance and outpatient health benefits. Malik told journalist the new funding will be used to expand Pazcare’s offerings and double its team size. Pazcare’s last round of funding was a $3.5 million seed round raised in October 2021.
The startup, which targets motorcycle taxi (boda boda) operators, their passengers and users of other forms of public transport (hereafter commuters), is building a business around daily micro-payments for personal accident covers, with some premiums going as low as $0.1. Macharia’s interest in the sector began in 2018 when he launched a pay-per-use micro insurance product for motor vehicles — which was informed by data and patterns he had observed when he operated an automobile repair shop. The personal accident coverage for motorcycle taxi operators, which requires premiums of $0.1 day ($3 a month) includes medical expenses up to $6,000 annually, and payment for loss of income due to hospitalization following an accident, disability or death. Macharia said their approach was informed by studies showing that boda boda riders desired insurance products that went beyond asset coverage.
By partnering with existing financial services platforms such as Acorns, Truebill and Albert, Trellis aims to help businesses that have an audience that are already engaged, and that they are having financial conversations with, help bring insurance into the conversation.
Consumers purchase Weather Guarantee protection when booking travel reservations and ticketed attractions online and if a weather event, such as rain, is forecasted to occur during the covered experience, Sensible automatically sends a reimbursement. The new capital will allow Sensible to grow its deep pool of top engineering and scientific talent, accelerate the development of its proprietary climate data and risk analytics platform and expand its Weather Guarantee offering into international markets.
Using EvolutionIQ, Vykruta claims that a claims adjuster, who may have hundreds of cases active at a time, can better understand short-term disability, long-term disability, workers comp and property and casualty claims.
The fintech company, founded in May 2021, came out of stealth mode Thursday with a lending tool aimed at bridging the gap between those policyholders, insurance companies and contractors so that a homeowner can choose a contractor and have repairs completed within 30 days versus 180 days.
New Era raised $60 million for its first fund, where the limited partner makeup was mostly high-net-worth individuals, family offices and founders of large private equity and hedge funds in the U.S. and large U.S. corporations interested in investing in the Israeli ecosystem. The firm raised $140 million for its second fund, and half of the LPs are U.S. and Israeli institutions.
But Jack Kudale, the founder and CEO, tells me that it’s projecting its policy holder base to grow three-fold in the next 12 months, to 35,000-40,000 customers (which would imply something around 17,000-20,000 businesses currently), and that its premium run rate (the insurance industry’s revenue run rate equivalent) has grown 40x this year, to $200 million, in what is still a very nascent market, with less than 10% of small businesses in the country currently taking out cyber insurance policies.
Lami co-designs products with its underwriting partners, extending unique insurance products to their customers, and through its technological infrastructure, facilitates the distribution of insurance products via a B2B2C approach.
The idea for Casava came while VisaCover provided an alternative in the auto insurance market by allowing drivers of Uber, which was one of its partners, to make weekly insurance payments instead of quarterly or yearly payments insurance partners before it operated.
The equity portion was led by Index Ventures and included new investors like Distributed Ventures and its anchor limited partner NFP, HSCM Bermuda, XYZ Ventures and a group of strategic angel investors. The company signed its first customer last July, and Ascend is now in all 50 states and working with customers like Vouch, Cowbell, Newfront, Boost Insurance, NFP, LuckyTruck, Rogue Risk, Portal Insurance and Riskwell. The new financing follows a $5.5 million seed round announced last September to give the company $39 million in total equity funding raised to date. Today, the company announced $30 million in Series A funding along with $250 million in lending to finance insurance premium loans by Hudson Structured Capital Management (HSCM Bermuda).
To get insurance, these businesses typically go through an insurance broker rather than go directly to the insurance provider, Asaf Lifshitz, co-founder and CEO of Sayata, said via email. Instead, Sayata developed a marketplace that is fully automated and done online to provide several insurance quotes from leading insurance providers based on a few pieces of information about the business inputted by the broker. That and an easy process means clients often go with the insurance offered by Sayata’s broker partners, Lifshitz said. It also enables the company to go after more of the small and medium-sized business insurance market that Lifshitz estimates is over $100 billion just in the United States.
