It takes eight minutes to sign up for coverage on Next Insurance’s digital platform - and the company has been growing at a pace of 20-25% every month since it started selling insurance online six months ago.
Guy Goldstein, company co-founder and chief executive, said in an interview with
Insurance Business that the company has found that providing tailored products has been key to the accelerated adoption of the platform among its target verticals.
The company is currently serving personal trainers, photographers, and construction-related professionals on its platform. These are mostly made up of small and medium enterprises, which comprise a $150 billion insurance market across the globe, according to industry estimates. He added that as the company rolls out products and services to this sector, they have observed that pricing is an important factor in providing coverage to SMEs, and that they are very comfortable with buying insurance online.
Next Insurance provides policies at a cost of $200 for the simplest plans, and $1,000 for the more complex plans annually, but clients can access them by paying monthly for their policies, which it believes makes insurance more accessible to a broader market. Goldstein said this subscription type scheme is popular among 99% of the company’s clientele, although there are a few exceptions that still prefer to pay for insurance on an annual basis. .
In the works is a policy renewal system, he added, although the company is still fine tuning the details of the service, specifically with respect to regulatory requirements.
The company recently secured $29 million in Series A funding from
Munich Re/HSB Ventures, while
Nationwide and Markel are also investors. The Palo Alto company also received an initial $13 million fund from Ribbit Capital, TLV Partners and Zeev Ventures.
“Insurance is changing to meet the needs of micro businesses,” Jacqueline LeSage Krause, Munich Re/HSB Ventures managing director said in a statement. She also observed that the company is in a good position to “precisely tailor insurance solutions” for client needs because of its deep knowledge base of their requirements.
“We’re excited to use this funding to expand to other business verticals,” Alon Huri, co-founder at Next Insurance, also emphasized in the same statement.
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