2019: Year in review
Looking back
2019 was a monumental year for us at Marshmallow. It was our first full year serving our customers and we’re proud that with their feedback we have made huge improvements.
We grew fast! We went from selling insurance to a few hundred early adopters, to doing hundreds of thousands of quotes per day and selling millions of pounds worth of insurance per month.
During 2019 we experienced 3000% growth!
This sort of growth isn’t just rare in insurance but across the whole tech space, where getting to $10m in annualised revenue in 2 years is classified as very good — something that we did in ~7 months.
Alongside customer and revenue growth, we grew the team behind the magic. We started the year with a team of 10, now we are 40+ with people joining us from Insurance behemoths, unicorns and smaller startups as well.
We applied technological methods to work out pricing, a strategy that allowed us to decrease prices for customers as the rest of the market increased them, and improved the customer experience by making changing policy details, adding drivers and chatting to our friendly team quicker and easier, leading to an `excellent` review on Trustpilot.
To get there we have not only relied upon our growing team, but a system that processed 130 million API requests, has 51 microservices and was subject to 2.5k deployments. We are incredibly proud of these stats, especially given we have just 11 engineers keeping the lights on!
All of our work supports our mission of making insurance benefit everyone by using technology to build affordable, instant and inclusive products. And, with just a 0.2% market share of UK car insurance, we’re just getting started….
The future
We have so much work to do, and despite a lot of good in 2019 there is obvious room for improvement.
From updating our machine learning models in pricing, fraud and operations to instant claims — we have a long way to go before we can be satisfied with our product, and the experience we are giving customers.
In terms of hard numbers, we expect triple digit % revenue growth and to double our team size over 2020.
We have barely scratched the surface of a market that touches everyone, and are on the look-out for people who want to make a big impact. If you are inspired to see how far technology can drive insurance forward, please check out our jobs here.
We’ll leave it there, excited for what’s to come!
