Last Week in InsurTech #008

Published in

Connecting The Dots

3 min readNov 26, 2018

InsurTech IPOs, WeChat crashing insurance, and fears about Amazon and Google. Sounds like a great week in InsurTech! More below:

InsurTech Venture Radar

Understory Inc. (US): $7.5m. Analytics startup which builds sensors for hyperlocal weather data collection. Investor(s): 4490 Ventures (lead) → source

Anorak (UK): £5.0m. Insurtech startup building an automated life insurance advice platform and APIs. Investor: Kamet Ventures (lead; backed by AXA). → source

InsurTech News

The German InsurTech IPO saga continues…
Deutsche Familienversicherung (DFV), or the company which claims to be the “only functioning InsurTech” in Germany, is giving this whole IPO thing another go. According to Finance Magazine, the company tried to go public this month but changed plans at the last minute because of unfavourable market conditions. The second attempt is set for December 4th and DFV is now going for a drastically lower initial share price, trying to raise €50m instead of the prior goal of €100m.

MAPFRE making it rain €25m on insurtech venture fund
According to a press release Spanish insurer MAPFRE “has decided to participate as an anchor investor in the “Alma Mundi Insurtech Fund, FCRE” venture capital fund, which will focus exclusively on the insurtech space.” The investment will put MAPFRE in the drivers seat in the fund, which will be investing in early stage InsurTech startups.

WeChat’s InsurTech WeSure partners with 20 (re)insurers
Reinsurance News reports that WeSure, “the insurance platform owned by Chinese investment conglomerate Tencent, has expanded its line of products and formed partnerships with 20 insurance and reinsurance companies.” The company has over 20 million active monthly users on the WeChat platform and is pushing out insurance products in a variety of personal lines. WeSure is bound to make a serious dent, after all, “WeChat has more than one billion monthly users.”

Aviva to buy majority stake in Neos Ventures
Neos — which was launched in 2016 and is based in London — combines connected smart home devices with home owners insurance. The press release did not disclose an amount. Aviva Ventures invests in early-stage InsurTech startups.

Measuring the scale of Amazon’s threat to the insurance industry
Alicja Grzadkowska has taken a deeper look at what it would mean if Google and Amazon were to go all-in on insurance in her latest article for Insurance Business. Should insurers be worried? She quotes Laird Rixford, CEO of Insurance Technologies Corporation (ITC) as saying: “They’re just trying to disrupt the distribution channel of leads, so when they have a device in every house and they’re able to integrate with any carrier, they’re effectively using themselves as a lead provider.” I know I’d be worried…

19 Strategies To Drive Innovation Now, according to CBInsights
CBInsights back at it again. This time, some great advice on how to “drive innovation now!”

”Tip #2: Launch an accelerator — You know you’re going to be disrupted, so what says you’re taking this seriously? Paying a vendor to set up an accelerator for you and giving $50k to 10 early-stage startups that are pre-product and pre-traction. Nothing says you’re serious about protecting your multi-billion dollar revenue like dropping $500k on 10 startups that your corporation isn’t suited to work with.”

Is it just me, or are accelerator programs getting a bad rap as of lately…