WeGroup, communication with digital customers
WeGroup has raised €1.5M in total. We talk with Arvid de Coster, its CEO.
PetaCrunch: How would you describe WeGroup in a single tweet?
Arvid de Coster: WeGroup helps insurance providers to better connect with their growing group of digital customers
PC: How did it all started and why?
AC: Insurance is a very conservative and slow industry, that has been lacking behind on technology when you compare it to other financial industry players such as banking. A lot of processes are very inefficient and result in high overhead costs and a lot of customer frustration. It also fails to use modern technology and resources, such as the vast amounts of open data available, which gives insurance players a big disadvantage in today’s market. WeGroup is destined to solve these problems. Initially, we were a B2C startup, trying to build ‘the insurance company of the future’. After a while, however, we found out that we could solve these problems better while working together with traditional players, both insurance carriers and distributors, which is why we pivoted away from B2C.
PC: What have you achieved so far?
AC: Since our founding in 2017, we are proud to have grown our team from three founders on an attic in Belgium to a growing company of 25 people, with offices in 3 European countries and active in the entire European Union. Thanks to landing some major international clients fast, we were able to raise €1.5M in seed funding, and our now working towards a Series A of €5M. Of our product development, we are equally proud. There is a lot of buzz around words like artificial intelligence and all its side domains, but we actually explored fields like deep learning and natural language processing to build actual working products, solving actual industry problems.
PC: How will you use your recent funding round?
AC: The money raised will be used mainly to accelerate our international expansion. Being operational in several European countries comes with different languages as well as cultural and economic differences. Therefore it is important to have team members all over the place, familiar with all these variables. This means both technical people (for support) as well as business people for sales and marketing.
PC: What do you plan to achieve in the next 2–3 years?
AC: In the next few years, we should proof that our solution is scalable on an international level. The diversity in Europe is great to put product and growth to the test, but of course our ambitions rise beyond that. The same industry challenges European companies are facing can be felt by their counterparts in the US and Asia. Therefore, we work towards scalable and healthy expansion in order to prepare ourselves to cross the ocean.
