German insurance startup Clark closes €13.2M Series A
By Steve O’Hear for Techcrunch.com
When I spoke with Jan Beckers, chairperson of fintech company builder FinLeap, earlier this year, he was particularly bullish about the insurance sector and the shake up he expects insurance brokering to receive because of new technology. That’s something we are starting to see happen.
Enter one of FinLeap’s existing portfolio companies, Clark, which operates in the insurance space with an app to help you stay on top of your various insurance products. Today the Berlin/Frankfurt startup is announcing it’s closed €13.2 million in Series A funding, made up of both equity and media-for-equity financing.
FinLeap is investing “several million Euros” once again, while additional investors include yabeo Capital, Kulczyk Investments, HitFox, TA Ventures, Tenderloin Ventures, along with various unnamed business angels.
Media investment, which I understand will mostly be in the form of TV advertising but will also include some online and print, comes from SevenVentures (the venture arm of the ProSiebenSat.1 Group), Axel Springer, and media investor GMPVC. The split between equity financing and media-for-equity financing is roughly 75 per cent to 25 per cent.
(Noteworthy is that FinLeap, which itself raised €21 million in new funding this June, is backed by institutional investors from the insurance industry, including Hannover Re, the third largest worldwide reinsurer.)
Calling itself an “insurance robo-advisor”, Clark’s iOS and Android apps let you manage and purchase various insurance products. Specifically, it uses algorithms to analyze your current insurance situation and automatically propose opportunities to improve your coverage or the deal you are currently on. The startup’s insurance experts are also on-hand via the app to help with more bespoke insurance questions.
Since the start of the year, Clark claims to have increased the volume of its managed insurance premiums five-fold, to 30 million Euros. The startup employs close to 20 people, most of whom are software developers.
Competitors include Knip, Getsafe and Financefox, but Clark reckons it differs in the way it uses robo-advisors (ie a more automated approach) to assess each user’s insurance situation and to send chat-messages to alert you to insurance opportunities.
“In addition, all clients have access to an in-app insurance cockpit,” the German startup says. “This works similar to fitness apps like runtastic or Nike running, i.e. the client can easily understand his “insurance fitness”.”
First appeared at TC
