Insurance has never been a sexy space, but in fact it has always been considered rather conventional and orthodox. However, when tech penetrates an industry and starts to play a key role, things get shaken up fast and the industry becomes interesting and hot. This is the case in the distribution of insurance products, which is currently incredibly outdated, annoying, inconvenient, and painful for the end consumer.
That’s why we are thrilled to announce that Nauta Capital has led a €2.3M Seed round in Barcelona-based WEECOVER to help them shape the future of insurance distribution. WEECOVER enables any retailer and digital platform to sell insurance products easily at scale.
Jordi and Rafael got out from Big Insurance to shake up the industry
Based out of Barcelona, WEECOVER has developed a very easy-to-use and simple to integrate embedded insurance platform that allows any company to offer insurance products in a matter of weeks without the need of suffering all the compliance and regulatory burden usually associated with selling insurance products. Most importantly, it only requires the integration of a single code snippet. Who said insurance could not be cool?
Among other many reasons why we fell in love with WEECOVER, find below the main pillars of our investment thesis.
🏭 WEECOVER helps a massive yet struggling industry
The insurance market is massive: it represents more than $5tn in gross-written premiums (GWP) globally. But the industry is amid a transformational phase as it faces a moving market environment brought forward both by technology and substantial changes in customer needs. Insurance was traditionally a poorly digitized sector but the current propositions (most of them B2C), despite being a significant progress for the industry, are still struggling to reach end customers efficiently and effectively. Innovation in insurance companies has been a pending subject for decades as the limited competition did not foster customer-centric technological improvement. Now it’s the time for the players to come up to speed if they want to avoid being left behind.
At Nauta Capital, we are betting strongly on helping the insurance industry progress through this transformational phase, and we have identified several trends and opportunities in the industry that will be important in the future, one of them being Embedded Insurance.
🔗 Sleek product, scalable tech, and TRULY embedded solution
After a deep dive into the space, we realized that Embedded Insurance has become a buzzword, present in almost every insurtech pitch deck and website. However, words often do not materialize into deeds, and very few providers are able to offer a real embedded experience. In our humble opinion, a solution involving a landing page with a form that collects endless and meaningless data points, and ends up sending an insurance proposal via email in a couple of days, does not deserve to be called embedded, and it is definitely not what we expect as consumers.
We were happy to see that WEECOVER does offer an API-first platform that easily integrates with both its channel and insurance partners’ offline and online processes, enabling full digital insurance underwriting and on-boarding capabilities (e.g., users can buy insurance on the checkout page of an e-commerce store or at the point of sale in a physical store). By seamlessly connecting insurance companies and consumer-facing companies (the channel partners), WEECOVER can offer a wide variety of insurance products: home, mobility (bikes, e-scooters, car-sharing), retail (warranty extension, damage, theft), payment protection, life, health… you name it. Thanks to WEECOVER, consumers can buy insurance covers in a friendly manner at those times when they are most concerned about the risks or right at the moment of the purchase of a product or service. For us, this is what Embedded Insurance should be.
WEECOVER has developed a suite of technologies that adapt to different transaction environments
🏆 Unique, ambitious and winning team
When we first met Jordi Pages and Rafael Gallardo, we were impressed by their understanding of the insurance industry and the strong team they form. They complement each other very well: Jordi has the vision and the strategic mindset, while Rafa contributes with his understanding of the product and the technology.
One could say that WEECOVER is “the new insurtech kid on the block”, but in reality Jordi and Rafa have been doing innovation in insurance through their whole career. Having held management roles in large insurance companies, they know the industry inside out, including its nuances and complexities. They have the type of industry knowledge that, in our opinion, is indispensable to operate such a business, understanding customer and partner needs, and having access to decision-makers, while still having the entrepreneurial skills, the determination, the open-mindedness and, most importantly, the grit to make it happen.
Ah, talking about winning, WEECOVER recently won two awards during South Summit 2021: the Best Fintech & Insurtech Startup and the Most Scalable Startup. Congratulations, Jordi & Rafa, you rock!
Welcome a future leader in Embedded Insurance
In sum, WEECOVER is well-positioned to become a global leader in the Embedded Insurance space. The strong focus on technology, their background in insurance, the simplicity and scalability of their Embedded Insurance solution, and their holistic offering across verticals are reasons why we believe WEECOVER clearly has what it takes to become a category leader.
Thanks, WEECOVER team, for letting us come onboard. We are proud to join you in this journey and look forward to seeing you grow. Welcome to the Nauta family!
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