Flock, the London-based insurtech using real-time data to enable and incentivise safer driving, announces it has raised $38 mn in series B funding, led by Octopus Ventures.
This round brings Flock’s total funding to $60 mn.
Octopus Ventures are joined in the funding round by CommerzVentures, as well as all existing institutional investors including Social Capital (led by Chamath Palihapitia), Dig Ventures (the family office of MuleSoft Founder Ross Mason), Anthemis, and Foresight Ventures.
Flock emerged from academic research into real-time risk analysis, undertaken by founders Ed Leon Klinger and Antton Pena.
Flock aims to make the world a quantifiably safer place by enabling and incentivising commercial motor fleets into safer driving habits.
The team launched the world’s first real-time insurance product for car rental platforms, courier companies, and corporate fleets in 2020 and Flock has rapidly become a leader in the market.
Today it works with more than 600 commercial fleet customers, including Jaguar Land Rover, Europe’s largest electric car subscription company Onto, and a third of the UK’s independent Amazon fleets.
Flock’s fleet insurance isn’t only proving commercially successful, its real-time telematics-based approach has also proven its ability to create safer roads.
By leveraging telematics data to help customers understand risk and identify high-risk drivers and routes, Flock has reduced its customers’ crash frequency by 10%. This safer driving is then rewarded with lower insurance premiums; with Flock, safer fleets pay less.
At Flock, we believe that insurers should help customers save time, money, and even lives. With our radically different insurance model, enabled by an immense amount of data, we hope to actively reduce the number of people needlessly killed or injured on the road.
Ed Leon Klinger, Flock’s CEO
“The best possible claim experience is no claim at all” he continued “We want to help our fleet customers predict and prevent crashes – before they even take place”.
This announcement comes in a period of economic uncertainty, when growth stage funding rounds – especially for fintech and insurtech businesses – are less common.
Ed believes that Flock has been a hit with investors due to its solid fundamentals, high calibre team, and undeniable product-market-fit (Flock has grown revenues by more than 30x since its Series A in 2021).
This funding round will allow Flock to expand into new segments of the commercial motor industry as well as new geographies.
Flock has a vision that can make the world safer not just for today’s vehicles but for the connected and autonomous vehicles of tomorrow. That vision of changing the world for the better is one we share at Octopus Ventures
Malcolm Ferguson, Partner, Octopus Ventures
The company will also be doubling down on its data-driven approach to risk quantification and dynamic pricing, significantly increasing the size of its data science and engineering teams, and more than doubling the size of its UK team in the coming years.
Emerging from an academic project to look at drones, Flock shifted into providing drone insurance, then commercial vehicle insurance. The twist is that it hooks into the telematics of cars so that the vehicle only triggers insurance cover when it’s actually moving, not when it’s sitting on the lot, incapable of causing any accidents.
Flock has raised $17 million in a Series A funding in 2021 led by Social Capital, the investment vehicle run by Chamath Palihapitiya, best known as a SPAC investor and chairman of Virgin Galactic. Flock’s existing investors Anthemis and Dig Ventures also participated. Justin Saslaw (Social Capital’s fintech partner) joins Flock’s board of directors, as does Ross Mason (founder of Dig Ventures and MuleSoft).
by Peter Sonner