The Insurtech Front Page Weekly CXO Briefing is all you need to know for the week, jargon free for CXO level business leaders and investors who want a piece of this huge, fast changing market. Each week we select one theme illustrated by 3 news items, because we know that you are busy. Our job is to filter out the noise, so you can read the signal. We bring you the raw news plus our take on why it is significant.
The Theme this week is early stage funding. This indicates that investors expect a robust growth for InsurTech. A few weeks ago we looked at Insurtech Exits. The Exit is when all the hard work pays off. This week we travel back up the innovation funnel to look at 3 early stage funding deals in Insurtech, which may pay off in good Exits at some point in the future.
For this week we bring you:
Story 1: Slice Labs Raises $20M in Extended Series A to Globalize its On-Demand Insurance Cloud Platform
Extract, read more on Slice blog:
“Slice Labs (Slice), a leading on-demand insurance cloud platform provider, today announced it has raised an additional $20 million in Series A funding, led by The Co-operators with participation from XL Innovate, Horizons, Munich Re/HSB Ventures, SOMPO, Veronorte, the investment arm of Grupo Sura, and JetBlue Technology Ventures. This sizable, extended round will be used to execute on the higher than planned global demand for Slice Insurance Cloud Services (ICS).”
Hey! Compared with consumer-facing services, insurer-facing services like ICS seem to be better received among insurers. Incumbents want to be improved rather than disrupted.
Story 2: Insurtech Socotra Raises $5.5 Million Series A
Extract, read more on Crowdfund insider:
“Socotra has raised $5.5 million in a Series A funding round bringing total raised for to date to $12.8 million for the InsurTech startup. 8VC led the funding round with 8VC founding partner, Joe Lonsdale joining the Socotra board.
Socotra is a cloud-native backend with open configuration and APIs allowing insurers to deploy backend technology with their own engineering resources.”
Hey! Similar with the first piece of news. The next big leap for insurance might first be made by SaaS solution providers rather than direct-to-consumer ventures.
Story 3: Concirrus closes £5 million funding round to service customer growth
Extract, read more on Concirrus blog:
“Concirrus, the London based InsurTech company leading the Marine and Motor Analytics market change, has raised £5 million in equity funding, bringing the total raised to £12 million. The raise was co-led by Cambridge-based deep tech venture capital firm IQ Capital and specialist InsurTech investor Eos Venture Partners.
Concirrus, who have brokers, insurers, major fleets and reinsurers as clients, announced a global agreement with EY in April this year which sees the two working together to drive adoption of Concirrus’ technology in the market. EY themselves are investing heavily in the insurance market through their Insurwave blockchain venture.”
Hey! Three in a row! B2B SaaS solution providers seem to be resonating with early stage Insurtech investors.
The market is open to B2B SaaS players with many different specialties. Insurers have strong demands in numerous aspects of their back offices. The digitization of core systems, scalability of internal engineering resources and data analytics offer many opportunities for startups.