FinTech news in investor survey category

The insurtech market has been through a rough time this past year, so we reached out to eight active investors in the space to get a read on what been cooking as the markets aggressively recalibrated what an insurtech startup is worth. When insurtech company Metromile went public via a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) in February last year, it was valued at over $1 billion. The bulk of the buyers, however, would likely be companies involved in insurance themselves — either insurtech companies acquiring some of their peers or legacy players. As the markets turned early this year, insurtech left most generalist investors’ playbooks almost as fast as Metromile and its peers’ plummeting valuations.

Despite concerns that the EWA technology is replicable, Aris Xenofontos, partner at Seaya, is of the belief that EWA is a defensible business model because the moving parts are complex enough to deter corporations from coming up with their own solutions. For accounts that start on an employee-pays model, employers will get a better understanding of how EWA improves employee productivity and retention over time. What we’ve found is that EWA startups typically service a mix of customers across both models, where the employer pays in some cases and the employee pays in others. Despite a few different EWA models seeing varying success at the moment, Ho believes the model that places the cost on the employer is the one that will win.