Insurance Technology Sector Overview — Q1 2018

By Venture Scanner,

The insurance technology sector has seen an abundance of activity over the past few years. As we previously analyzed, insurtech funding has shown early signs of maturation and its exit events have seen robust growth.

We will now do a deeper dive of the different components of insurance technology and how they make up this startup ecosystem. We have classified the companies into 14 categories. This blog post will illustrate what these categories are and which categories have the most companies. We will also look at how these categories compare with one another in terms of their funding and maturity.

Insurance Marketplace Is the Largest Insurance Technology Category

Let’s start off by looking at the Sector Map for the insurance technology sector. As of March 2018, we have classified 1503 insurance technology startups into 14 categories that have raised $22 billion. The Sector Map highlights the number of companies in each category. It also shows a random sampling of companies in each category.

We see that Insurance Comparison/Marketplace is the largest category with 420 companies. These companies enable consumers to compare different insurance providers, or buy insurance of any kind (car to home to health). Some example companies are Goji, Policygenius, CoverHound, and Coverfox.

We have seen what the different categories making up this sector are and the number of companies in each. What about their funding and maturity in relation to one another? Let’s look at our Innovation Quadrant to find out.

Reinsurance Is the Heavyweight Category in Insurance Technology

Our Innovation Quadrant divides the insurance technology categories into four different quadrants.

We see that the Pioneers quadrant has the most insurance technology categories with 10. The Pioneer categories are in the earlier stages of funding and maturity. The Disruptors quadrant includes Health Insurance, Auto Insurance, and Life, Home, P&C Insurance. These three categories have acquired significant financings at a young age. The Heavyweights quadrant contains the Reinsurance category. This category has reached maturity with significant financing. Reinsurance companies provide insurance products to other insurance companies to help them hedge their bets and streamline their costs. Some example companies are AnalyzeRe, PlaceRe, PeakRe, and EazyRe.

We’ve seen the insurance technology categories and their relative stages of innovation. Let’s now look at how they stack up against one another in terms of their total funding versus company counts.

Health Insurance Startups Have the Most Funding

The graph below shows the total amount of venture funding and company count in each category.

As noted earlier, Health Insurance, Auto Insurance, and Life, Home, P&C Insurance have the highest average funding per company. The above graphic highlights that these three categories also have the highest total funding in insurtech. Among the three categories, Health Insurance leads the sector with over $10 billion in total funding.

Health Insurance contains companies that offer health-related insurance products for consumers and businesses. Some of the best-funded companies in this category are Oscar Health ($893M), Zenefits ($584M), and Clover Health ($425M). It’s also noteworthy that the funding in Health Insurance is 28% higher than the funding in the next category, Life, Home, P&C Insurance.

Conclusion: Insurance Marketplace and Health Insurance Categories Lead Insurtech

From the above analysis, we can see that the Insurance Marketplace category leads the sector in total companies. The Health Insurance category leads the sector in total funding. On the other hand, the Reinsurance category stands out as the Heavyweight category in our Innovation Quadrant. It has reached maturity with significant average funding per company versus other categories. It’ll be interesting to see how the insurance technology landscape will change and develop throughout the rest of 2018.

To learn more about our complete insurance technology report and research platform, visit us at www.venturescanner.com or contact us at info@venturescanner.com.