Scouting for Growth Roman Rittweger: Insights on building a winning HealthTech startup in Germany
On this episode, Sabine VdL interviews Roman Rittweger, founder and CEO of Ottonova – a digital health insurance provider for individual patients and self-employed people. Today, seven+ years after it was started, Ottonova has over 100 employees and has deployed a marketplace (or an end-to-end platform) that helps users register for and access health insurance coverage for medical services. By 2022, the team had raised over $145 million in Series E. Some of its investors include great names such as Early Bird Venture Capital and Seven Ventures.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- Health insurance is one of the most complicated insurances to build. People asked me why I wanted to do this, build a HealthTech InsurTech and why I wouldn’t just want to be a service provider for a health insurance company? My answer is I already had been a service provider and I didn’t enjoy it much because you can’t steer the business your way. I wanted to be able to design the tariff, be the customer’s partner, make the sale at the very beginning of the engagement, manage the customer and make them really happy, as well as save costs at the end for all the parties involved. To do this you need to have the whole package.
- We work in two ecosystems: the insurance ecosystem where we are the most modern player in Germany, we have the highest net promoter score (67, where the number two has 34). At the same time, we sell our software in Germany and get into other areas and other ecosystems like life insurance where we’re starting to sell products and software to other health insurance providers.
- I definitely see that the lines are blurring between health and wellness. We have created a HealthX Club where, in exchange for taking part in market research with us, we give our users' bonus points to spend on their AppleWatch, fitness club, meditation app, etc. The German customers are insured with us, we want them to stay healthy. Also, we’re starting to work with partners in the fitness field, and even in cosmetics and dental as we figure out if we can add an insurance part to their product. As we’re digital and relatively agile, it’s very easy for us to build that for them.
- Our VCs were very much shocked by the amount of regulation and the volume of people we had to bring on board to become compliant and get our insurance licence. They were also shocked by the amount of money we had to invest. After a while, we started to look for other ways to bring financing into the company. We had to go via new routes including re-financing. Note that German investment leaders are not tech-savvy, so they invested with us because they wanted to learn from us. We know that corporate venturing (or the stage where corporates want to partner and invest) will always be there for companies like ours because it is part of the stages of any industry-led startup growth process.
BEST MOMENTS
‘I had to wait for the right time, and have a little bit of luck as well, to start Ottonova. This took me 10 years.’
‘Finding the right customer was the only easy part!’
‘We ask our customers what they want because what you think they might want isn’t what’s important for them. Here is an example, rather than getting medicine delivered before they need it by drone, they’d prefer for bills to be paid within 24 hours rather than 48 hours. Understanding such nuances is truly understanding your customers' needs.’
‘In our case, our direct chat and the service we provide day-to-day is actually much more important for our customers than the ‘sexy’ telemedicine engagement platform we created – we haven’t seen a big uptake in that for instance yet.’
ABOUT THE GUEST
Roman Rittweger is a doctor by training, though he didn’t work for long in medicine, he worked as a consultant on the macro-level of healthcare and insurance, thinking of the customer and how to provide a better experience for them and how to make it more affordable by steering the customer towards the right kind of medical care. His first startup was a medical provider for health insurance helping the insured population to find the right physician or to work with their chronic diseases.
He sold this company to Germany’s largest private health insurer at the time and became a consultant again. He learned about marketing and sales because he’d realised through his experience that this is the most important thing. He eventually started looking for the next big area in which he could start more startups and six years ago he sold his consultancy and jumped into the world of digital health insurance, founding Ottonova.
ABOUT THE HOST
Sabine is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur. She is the CEO and Managing Partner of Alchemy Crew, a venture lab that accelerates the curation, validation, & commercialization of new tech business models. Sabine is renowned within the insurance sector for building some of the most renowned tech startup accelerators around the world working with over 30 corporate insurers & accelerating over 100 startup ventures. Sabine is the co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, a top 50 Women in Tech, a FinTech and InsurTech Influencer, an investor & multi-award winner.
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