Seel — Questioning the status quo

The status quo in insurance is to cover catastrophic risks such as earthquakes and car crashes. These events don’t occur very often but when they do, they are catastrophic. They are underwritten by long-tenured domain experts, guided by actuarial tables, and sold through brokers and agents. The conventional wisdom in the insurance industry is that minor, everyday risks are uninsurable. According to them, small risks that consumers take every day such as ordering food that might arrive late or buying shoes that can’t be returned are not worth insuring because their actuarial tables don’t exist and consumers can’t be served profitably.

There’s nothing quite like young tech founders to question the status quo. They see opportunity where others see problems. Zack and Bill, co-founders of Seel (fka Kover), passionately believe that you can indeed profitably protect consumers against every day risk — they call it high frequency, low severity risk (HFLS). So, two years ago, they started to build out a whole new system of managing risk — a system that can ingest massive, unstructured, online consumer data (images, text, time series of web sessions, etc), to price risk programmatically, and distributes them using APIs.

Today, this platform, while still early, enables Seel to underwrite risks that actuaries couldn’t price before and sell coverages at a scale that was not possible before. It’s what enables Seel to price and sell thousands of protection plans a month for their breakthrough, initial, e-commerce product — Returns Assurance — without a single actuary, agent or claim adjuster.

As original Pre Seed investors, it gives us immense pleasure to see the script turn into the movie. But Seel has only just begun and the full movie is yet to play out. With Lightspeed leading Seel’s $17M series A we hope that the best parts are yet to come!