For a few weeks, I've been advocating InsurTech is lacking relevant comparables.
And to feed the discussion, we finally ran an analysis emphasizing how full-stack players (most of public InsurTech in the USA, see the chart on the right) are actually a tiny part of the market.
Hence, have a look at that chart above highlighting the number of rounds raised by full-stack startups (i.e. with an insurance regulatory approval) over the last few years in InsurTech Europe.
If public InsurTech have had tough times, they are a very limited and biased benchmark for insurance innovation and technology. Especially for InsurTech Europe, that I will focus on for that analysis.
First, if there were a few InsurTech startups that went public in the last few years, there are a lot of startups in InsurTech Europe (over 1,000 pure players !)
Then, it is worth reminding that most of the listed players have a very specific positioning: for instance Lemonade, Hippo, Root or OscarHealth are all full-stack players. That means they all have an insurance licence and operate as a carrier.
On the other hand, as you can see on the chart below, this setup accounts for a very tiny part of the InsurTech market. Around 2.5% of every startup in InsurTech Europe is a full-stack player !
They are also distributing (mainly) directly while we see a growing diversity in distribution InsurTech as the industry is maturing, with tools for existing distributors and Embedded Insurance, alongside pure direct players.
It is also worth highlighting that SaaS solutions and Enterprise Softwares have been accounting for a significant part of every deals announced in InsurTech Europe for a while. And these players do have benchmarks, with public SaaS companies.
Finally, it is worth mentioning that most of these public players are operating on personal lines. While we have a nice benchmark and success in commercial lines in InsurTech Europe with +Simple that had a great LBO exit last year.
Long story short we should keep in mind InsurTech Europe is very diverse and I believe it lacks benchmarks rather than suffer from bad benchmarks, considering them as biased.
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