The company has raised €500K in a pre-seed round from angel investors to date, including Elias Jacobson, (former CEO of the groundbreaking Swedish AI company Peltarion), Robert Chirico Willstedt (co-founder of the Swedish mobile game Quizduel), Emanuel Lipschütz (founder of and CTO at Netsafe), and Mikael Karlsson (founder of MW group). Luminar Ventures is now joining the company as its main investor.
How will Insurtech use the funds?
Insurely aims to digitise the insurance market in Sweden and beyond by introducing innovative APIs and easy-to-use solutions for Open Insurance. Open Insurance basically refers to providing services and data to partners, communities, and startups, in order to create new services, applications, and innovative/disruptive business models.
This raised capital will enable the company to continue its growth by recruiting new talent and expanding operations to more markets in Europe including the Netherlands.
“There is a real spike in demand for innovative API solutions tailored for the insurance industry and we’re now gearing up to scale our business and support more players within the European insurance market. With Open Insurance taking off, I expect us to grow our business by as much as five times this year alone. We´re also looking to double our team with new recruits, especially within product development and partnerships,” says Martin Einemo, CEO and co-founder of Insurely.
Why was Insurely created?
In an exclusive conversation with Silicon Canals, Einemo talks about the inception of Insurely, initial challenges, growth and future plans.
He believes, in the current scenario, the core issues in the global insurance market are the lack of digitalisation, transparency, and inaccessibility. Due to this, consumers may not know if they have the right insurance protection they need, or if they are paying too much, or in some cases, they don’t fully understand their insurance policies.
According to him, “Insurance products are perceived as complex and are of low interest compared to mortgages and banking products. This causes information and interest gap, which in turn leads to a variety of problems, such as that consumers are underinsured, overinsured, don’t know what their policies include, and hesitate of switching insurance since they don’t want to risk having a “worse” policy. In many markets, an aggressive renewal pricing strategy from incumbents has turned this information gap into unfair pricing for some consumers.”
This what the company wanted to change. With Insurely, the founders wanted to make the industry more transparent and accessible. “By supporting insurers and financial players to obtain quality insurance data, the company’s API products support them to personalise and streamline the customer onboarding journey, optimise pricing, as well as create more consumer-centric products overall.”
The company was founded by co-founders Martin Einemo, Johan Forsman, Eric Sevelius, and Lotta Rauséus. The founders have a background in management consulting within financial services, in e-commerce, and the tech industry – which helped them understand the issues faced by the insurance industry from both a consumer and business & tech perspective.
Initial Insurely
Talking about the initial challenges faced by the company, Einemo says, “One of the biggest challenges, and also one of the biggest opportunities, is the legacy in the insurance industry. It seems that on a global level, the business models and tech are not adapted to be serving the actual customer needs and addressing the actual pain-points.”
He also believes that since insurance products are complicated, advanced data models are required to be built to make insurance simple and serve all the different use cases for insurance data out there.
“In the beginning, we were also met with a fair amount of scepticism from the insurance industry – which makes sense since not everyone benefits from a more open insurance data landscape. However it seems that the winds are changing and the majority of players understands the potential; we see more demand for our services than ever before,” he adds.
What services does Insurely provide?
Insurely is a digital insurance platform offering APIs and solutions for Open Insurance to support insurers to optimise their offering, pricing, and customer experience by using insurance data.
With Insurely’s solutions, companies can create services for switching insurance contracts, as well as enabling insurance in their personal finance management apps and more.
The company’s Open Insurance offering was launched in 2020, with dynamic API integrations, it makes it possible for insurers and financial players to access real-time data from as much as 95 per cent of the Swedish insurance market. “By offering clients the ability to obtain high-quality insurance data, our solutions can support them to personalise and streamline the customer onboarding journey, optimise pricing, and create more consumer-centric products,” says Martin Einemo.
Several major Swedish insurance players like ICA Försäkringar, part of one of the largest grocery retail stores in Sweden and the insurance challenger Hedvig are already using Insurely’s platform.
One of the most used applications is a solution that allows for end-users to compare their existing insurance policies with new offerings, which has proven to increase both conversion and user engagement. “Some of our current clients have been able to double their conversion rate on their site while some clients have seen an increase in their online sales by up to 30 per cent,” adds Martin.
Besides white-labeled API solutions, Insurely also claims to offer an end-consumer app, which supports almost a hundred thousand users to get better information by providing an overview of existing insurance policies, terms, and costs. The company currently operates in Sweden and Norway. Leading Swedish insurance companies such as ICA Försäkringar and Hedvig are some of its clients.
Let’s talk numbers
The company offers its API’s licenses to companies with an aim to help them build effective customer journeys, such as simplified switching of insurance contracts, or the ability to let consumers collect all insurance policies in one place.
In a 12 month period, it has increased the number of partnerships with insurers, banks & personal finance apps by 500%. Also, in 2020, the platform claims to have had over 100,000 end-users using Insurely’s services.
Insurely earns a majority of revenue from licensing the usage of its APIs and solutions to different customers. Einemo explains, “Typically, our pricing model comes with a monthly flat fee for an unlimited number of requests to our services – we want to incentivise a high usage of our services. There are many upsell opportunities going forward as our API becomes more sophisticated so we will be able to charge more for our services as we grow.”
Human Resources
Currently, the company has 8 full-time employees who focus on partnerships, business development, and technical development.
With the rise in demand for its services, the company plans to have a total of at least 20 employees in total, by the end of this year. It is already hiring talents in its tech, commercial, and product design team.
Source: Silicon Canals
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