Vouch Launches In California to Make Business Insurance Simple for Startups
Insurance Enables Innovation
The days of “move fast and break things” are over. Growth at all costs is no longer acceptable in the era of implosions, bad actors, and massive cybersecurity breaches.
Today’s startups — in particular those in tech — are under a microscope, with everyone from the public to regulators and investors examining behavior, business practices, and leadership. Yet expectations of constant innovation and brave risk-taking have not been adjusted accordingly. Startups are often held to the same standards as high-profile established companies, but are taking much bigger risks.
At Vouch, our purpose is to help startup founders and executives understand and manage the inherent risks with starting — and scaling — a company. Insurance is necessary to the founding of any business, and essential to its growth. Our primary focus is removing the confusion and friction from business insurance, and giving founders a solution that scales so they can focus on growing their startup.
What Exists For Startups Isn’t For Startups
For the past few months, the Vouch team has spent our time split between Y Combinator in California and traveling to our initial launch markets across the country to learn about startups’ pain points, meet founders, and understand the landscape.
Every market is totally different, but founders everywhere are in search of the same things from their insurance providers: a simple product experience, affordability, a wide breadth of coverage, and scalability. Founders often lose sleep over the many competing risks in their business. Most are not insurable, but some of the most surprising and severe risks are. These include product liability, employment issues, and cybersecurity, and Vouch covers them all.
We also learned from founders that when you need insurance, you really need it. We met startups who overcame frivolous lawsuits from Fortune 500 competitors, while others faced crippling litigation with poor protection from legacy insurers who put their own finances first. We’ve met companies that have dealt with mission-critical cyberattacks, and founders that had to wait six months just to get reimbursed for a stolen laptop.
In our launch markets we’ve surpassed 5% market share in less than 8 weeks. We’ve established a preferred partnership with Silicon Valley Bank and an early investment from Y Combinator Continuity, that we’re announcing this week, along with our major market expansion: our own backyard.
Unique Risk, Unique Reward
Today, we’re launching in California. This marks our foray into the heart of the technology and startup world. The insurance market in California is fragmented, and no insurer — whether big legacy carrier, regional shop, or newer entrant to the space with a digital presence — has deep expertise with startups.
We help companies get the insurance coverage they need from the beginning. Vouch is personalized, and it takes less than 10 minutes to get covered (in contrast to the days, weeks, or even months that it would take today). In order to simplify the process for startups, we’ve built a database of in-scope companies specifically for California, based on a variety of publicly available data. We’re invested our time and energy in making it incredibly simple for our customers to scale via simple onboarding, renewals, claims and adjustments. We’re in the business of helping our clients move faster, and we’re invested in helping them do it the right way.
