Plum Life

Nathan Golia
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Manish Bhatt, Plum Life
"Life insurance is sold not bought" – a familiar maxim to people who work in the industry. But there's opportunities being left on the table to sell more, according to the co-founders of Plum Life.

Those four co-founders include Manish Bhatt, who spent several years as MetLife's digital leader; and Rahim Rajpar, who led marketing and direct-to-consumer efforts for John Hancock, In an interview, the executives explain that life insurance's perceived complexity is keeping some agents away from tackling the product.

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Trellis

Kaitlyn Mattson
Daniel Demetri has always been interested in the combination of finance and technology, even before it was called fintech.

"The idea that technology can shape the course of business, that's a new idea," says Demetri, who is the CEO and founder of Trellis, a B2B2C digital solutions insurtech with an API platform, Savvy, for comparing insurance policies, which the company launched in 2020.

"I started seeing how we could use technology as solutions to financial services problems," he says.

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Onuu

Michael Shashoua
It's pronounced "on-you."

Onuu, a startup banking, credit and life insurance platform founded in September, is preparing to launch this summer with a mission to serve 166 million Americans of modest means who may be excluded from traditional insurance and financial services. 

Asked why "on you," co-founder and CEO Felix Ortiz says the name stands for the idea that "We're basically betting on you. We're wanting to grow you."

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Cover Whale

Ganny Belloni
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Dan Abrahamsen, co-founder and CEO, Cover Whale
For Daniel Abrahamsen, a 15-year veteran of the insurance industry, years of managing hundreds of millions of dollars while setting up claims admin systems led him to realize that the industry's traditionally innovation-averse mindset was not only inefficient – it was making companies lose money.

"I really got a firsthand look at what insurance companies were spending money and time on– they weren't really spending their budget on technology around risk management and loss control," he says.

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Tint

Kaitlyn Mattson
Matheus Riolfi and Jerome Selles met while working at Turo, a car-sharing marketplace, where they both did work on the global expansion of its insurance program. During that time, the two saw an opportunity to start their own insurtech, Tint.

Tint provides companies, including insurtechs, an embedded insurance option for platforms including APIs, as well as back-end support. Embedded insurance is typically bundled into the purchase of a product or service. It doesn't require a separate interaction with an insurer but integrates the insurance coverage into the transaction.

"We looked at the market and saw companies going on the same journey to launch embedded insurance," says Riolfi. "We believe embedded insurance is the biggest transformation in insurance since it was created."

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Sensa

Nathan Golia
As insurance's digital transformation continues, insurtechs are finding new avenues to bring their offerings to a wider audience. So is the case for Sensa, an offshoot of the existing insurtech MDgo, that is choosing to bring the company's crash detection technology directly to consumers with the launch of an auto insurance product.

Like many entrants to the auto insurance space, Sensa uses telemetry to set itself apart from legacy companies. However, it's not monitoring driving habits. Instead, the Sensa device only activates at the time of a crash, providing immediate notice of loss to the company as well as beginning a triage process that founder Itay Bengad believes can reduce loss severity.

"When people hear about telematics, they hear UBI, right? But telematics is only the way you obtain data from a car," he says. "But we have taken that [claim] moment, which turns into significant profitability due to the loss ratio reduction.

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AgentSync

Kaitlyn Mattson
The founders of AgentSync, Niji Sabharwal, CEO, and Jennifer Knight, CTO, met while working at LinkedIn over a decade ago. The two, who are now married, didn't expect to get involved in the insurance market.

"We wanted to work on something together," says Sabharwal. "We never would have thought it would be this type of software."

AgentSync, an insurtech focused on software and tools for producer management, was primarily conceptualized when Sabharwal was working at Zenefits, a SaaS company offering HR, benefits and payroll tools, in 2014. He was working mostly on managing sales and operations there, and eventually turned his focus to insurance regulation.

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Nirvana

Bob Violino
Nirvana Insurance was founded in early 2021 "to bring the trucking industry up to speed with the rest of the world" in terms of insurance, says Rushil Goel, CEO and co-founder of the company.

The company announced the launch of its first offering, a telematics-based platform that is designed to modernize commercial fleet insurance by using vast amounts of driving data gathered from sensors on trucks in February. The goal is to make roads safer and aid the imperiled trucking industry, according to Nirvana.

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iLife

Michael Shashoua
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Nelson Lee began his career as a software engineer. His first attempt at a technology startup was a consumer-facing business.

Then, he says, it dawned on him that "the bigger opportunity wasn't my own consumer-facing business, but how insurance agents were stuck with very inefficient processes that were expensive and slow–and they were losing deals left and right."

Lee set out to build an application that would create value for life insurance agents by helping them sell more policies than they could on their own. With co-founder Amit Lohia, Lee launched iLife 10 months ago as a digital hub for life insurance agents. Lee focused on life insurance as opposed to auto or home insurance because those businesses' products are legally required for drivers, mortgages or renters. Therefore, life insurance can be a tougher sell, so agents have to do more, he says.

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Foresight

Kaitlyn Mattson
Before there was Foresight, a commercial worker's compensation insurtech, there was Safesite, a safety management platform and app. The two companies are a part of the Foresight Group, co-founded by long-time friends Peter Grant, CEO of Safesite, and David Fontain, CEO of Foresight.

Grant explains that the death of a friend, in a workplace incident, led the two to start Safesite.

"We wanted to keep that from happening to anyone else," says Grant. "We built the tech to keep that from happening."

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