The investment was led by Fuel Ventures and Indico Capital and comes just six months after the completion of the company’s pre-seed round.
The seed round builds substantially on previous funding from Fuel Ventures, Founders Factory, Insurtech NY, Magic Fund, and Indico Capital Partners.
Founded in 2022, Eleos has rapidly established itself as the UK’s only provider of fully digital life insurance and income protection products. The company is on track to exceed £1 million in revenue by the end of 2024.
Eleos tackles two key issues in the insurance industry: the challenge of effectively communicating the importance of financial protections such as income protection and life insurance, and the industry’s struggle to create fully digital solutions.
The company also leverages its proprietary full stack B2B2C solution, which includes APIs and white-label journeys, to simplify integration for partners without incurring extra costs. This allows Eleos’s partners to tap into new revenue streams, boost customer retention, and gain full regulatory coverage under the company’s FCA authorization. Among Eleos’s current partners are credit-building specialists Loqbox and CreditLadder, as well as flexible loan providers CreditSpring and Updraft.
In the UK, life insurance penetration currently stands at 35%, with income protection at just 6%. Although adoption rates for these protections have been slowly rising, Eleos aims to accelerate this trend by increasing awareness and improving access, a key part of its mission.
Led by CEO Kiruba Shankar Eswaran, who previously founded Zaask in Portugal and later sold the company to Worten, Eswaran has also led other successful startups and exits in the UK. Regarding Eleos’s seed funding round, he stated: “With our new funding we will launch more lines of insurance in the life and disability verticals and strike more distribution partnerships in the UK. Part of the funding is also earmarked to launch operations in the US.”
Mark Pearson, founder of Fuel Ventures, also commented, saying: “We’ve been looking for a way into the insurtech sector for a long time but to do that we need a team with specialist experience, an understanding of the challenges and access to a substantial market. With Eleos we’ve found all three and we believe their products encapsulate our thinking about the insurance space – giving people easy access on familiar platforms. We’re working together to make our shared vision of the future a reality and that’s why we’ve doubled down on our support for their growth and expansion.”
Stephan Morais, Managing General Partner of Indico Capital Partners, added: “Indico is happy to keep supporting experienced founders such as the founders of Eleos. The insurtech market has plenty of room to grow and Eleos is targeting areas which are not only sizeable but overlooked by other current players globally.”
