The Swedish home insurance startup Hedvig has raised €9,3m from San Francisco based Obvious Ventures and Swedish retailer group Axel Johnson’s venture leg D-Ax.
The Swedish home insurance startup Hedvig has raised €9,3m from San Francisco based Obvious Ventures and Swedish retailer group Axel Johnson’s venture leg D-Ax.
The company uses technology to automate many of the processes including pricing and claims. According to the cofounder Lucas Carlsén, much of the claim process is already automated.
It means that if you lose your laptop in Copenhagen, you would open the Hedvig app to record a voice message. From that voice message we can determine what happened and then trigger an automatic payoff, which would happen in a couple of minutes
Hedvig cofounder Lucas Carlsén
Apart from taking its cut on what users pay in insurance fees, the money that is not paid out in claims is donated to charities.
Hedvig has attracted angel investors such as Khaled Helioui — who is also an investor in Uber, Deliveroo and Bolt — as well as Sophia Bendz, partner at Atomico, and Victor Jacobsson, one of the co-founders of Klarna. Hedvig is also backed by Berlin-based venture capital company Cherry Ventures.
With only 15,000 customers in Sweden, the company is planning to invest the new capital in growing both its customer base, in Sweden and later internationally, and by expanding its insurance offering to houses, instead of just serving flats as before.
American Lemonade, which started off by offering home insurance in New York back in 2015, has raised $480m from Softbank. This summer it also embarked on Europe by launching in Germany.
Although insurtech is a commonly used word for the startup’s sector, most companies within it are middlemen creating a better user experience but are co-operating with the big insurance companies.
German startup Getsafe, an insurance broker that has so far raised $23m dollar according to Crunchbase, is an example of that. The Belgian startup Qover, that recently raised €8m has a different model offering digital companies insurance-as-a-service.
by Peter Sonner
