Scouting for Growth

On this episode, Sabine VdL interviews Allison or Ally Schneider who heads up venture partnerships at Vouch, a US business insurance platform for startups. Vouch raised over $160 million in investment funding so far with well-renowned investors including Silicon Valley Bank, Index Ventures and Y Combinator. Ally talks to Sabine about the company’s business model and helps us understand how Vouch helps founders like you grow and scale in the right way.   KEY TAKEAWAYS The product and experience have been very manual traditionally, we’ve been able to build a digital-first experience for founders to be able to obtain business insurance. They can apply through our site in 7-10 minutes through our questionnaire, which asks specific questions about their business that gives them a customised quote in terms of what coverage and limits we recommend, and they can adjust those parameters to suit them and their coverage will go live at midnight on the same day. This not only reduces the time for the startup founders but also provides a very easy self-service experience for those that want it to be self-served. When you think of legacy risk classification systems, they tend to be very broad and vague. We break it down into 70 niche codes (from connected home devices to B2B SaaS, AI/machine learning) to get really granular and customised about the customer needs in their different types of companies. That goes into our underwriting algorithm to be able to say these are the coverages that make the most sense for your business in terms of where you are today as well as the ones you might like to look at as the business grows and scales in the future. We have 10 proprietary lines of covers. We’re in the process of becoming a full carrier, which gives us a lot more flexibility to go direct-to-consumers, to do more from a discounting and bundling perspective, and flexibility from a timing perspective as well as to put coverage in place and bound the risk quickly. We also take a really proactive approach to risk management as well. A founder has so many responsibilities, to their business and people too. There are things that founders are incredible at, and having business insurance expertise typically isn’t one of them – and nor should it. We think about our role as to how we can make this process as painless, easy, cost-effective and high quality, as we should be able to save these founders time and energy so that they can focus their time and effort on the things that are really important to their business   BEST MOMENTS ‘The energy that you get spending your days surrounded by the most amazing entrepreneurs and founders, talking with them through the most interesting problems that they’re solving: That doesn’t get old.’ ‘I get asked if I’m a corporate or a startup person, I actually really enjoy both environments as long as I can collaborate with the other.’ ‘When business insurance matters, it really matters. It’s an area where it’s really high importance but low awareness. We saw the opportunity to build really innovative products and services that are really geared towards these types of companies as we really want to fill that education gap too: or why business insurance is really important for founders.’ ‘Our insurance advisors’ expertise set us apart in terms of how we engage with our customers or the startup founders effectively and directly. They understand the inner workings of how startups operate and what it means to be an eCommerce business vs a SaaS business... the milestones those companies go through and the risks they face.’   ABOUT THE GUEST Allison Schneider is heading Venture Ecosystem Partnership at Vouch Insurance, she is relatively new to the InsurTech world with a background in corporate and startup collaborations. She started her career at IBM Waston on IBM's startup partnership programme, supporting startups that were building off IBM’s AI and machine learning APIs, offering them the technology, support and resources they needed to grow. Through that role, Alli fell in love with AI and machine learning, technology in general, and the possibilities and use cases of how these technologies can be utilised. After IBM she spent some time at a venture-backed startup called x.ai building out their sales and business development practice, working with corporates from the other side of the table. She then went back into corporate, working at Principal, E*TRADE Ventures and Labs, leading the startup mission there while engaging and building bridges with FinTech and enterprise tech startups shaping proof of concepts, prototypes and commercial pilots.https://www.vouch.us/    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.  Twitter: SabineVdL LinkedIn: Sabine VanderLinden Instagram: sabinevdLofficial Facebook: SabineVdLOfficial TikTok: sabinevdlofficial Email: podcast@sabinevdl.com Website: www.sabinevdl.com

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. https://www.ottonova.de/    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.  Twitter: SabineVdL LinkedIn: Sabine VanderLinden Instagram: sabinevdLofficial Facebook: SabineVdLOfficial TikTok: sabinevdlofficial Email: podcast@sabinevdl.com Website: www.sabinevdl.com  

On this episode, Sabine VdL interviews Steven Mendel, CEO and Co-Founder of Bought By Many, an InsurTech startup that is really well known across the UK market with a new brand launched in the US under the brand name "ManyPets." Bought By Many is making the world a better place for pet parents through its tech-enabled insurance products and services.    KEY TAKEAWAYS The first startup I was involved with was in the investment consulting space in the mid-90s, from there I became a management consultant and went on to set up three more startups, all in the finance space but none of them directly to do with insurance. Bought By Many started off in the broader insurance space but over several years we narrowed it down so we only operate in the pet space now. For many years I’d been troubled by the poor way large corporates treat individuals – in particular in financial services – in contrast, they treat other corporates very very well. I felt I had to do something to redress the balance between corporates and individuals in financial services. We asked our pet community members to fill out a questionnaire to understand what they thought of the insurance industry, how they would have made it better themselves and asked what their perfect pet insurance policy would look like. We got 40,000 responses and created seven brand-new go-to-market products in September 2016. Instead of going live, we took the opportunity to reimagine every step of the customers’ insurance journey so that when we launched in February 2017 there was nothing about the experience that bore any relation to anything else that they would have seen in the pet space anywhere before. We became a double unicorn in eight and three-quarter years. But, in truth, I can’t get excited about the valuation at all. It doesn’t change in any way the business, the people we want to recruit, our existing staff, our focus on our customer base, our focus on the pets and our focus on the pet parents. It’s an important milestone, of course, but it has not changed us as a business one single piece of the way.   BEST MOMENTS ‘Our first TV advert was at the very beginning on direct to household advertising, and we were able to work with Ridley Scott’s production studio to create something genuinely different and quirky.’ ‘The idea behind Bought By Many was creating communities of individuals who had similar but niche insurance needs and to help them get access to better insurance – price, product and customer experience.’ ‘Our Net Promoter Score has never been below 70.’ ‘Pet owners do talk, they want to know what pet food you use, what vet you go to and who insures your pet. Having members of ours who advocate in the marketplace is really important for us and has massive knock-on economic benefits, of course.’   ABOUT THE GUEST Steven has over 25 years of experience as an actuary in financial services which has included leading Close Brothers Wealth Management during the launch of their non-advised offering; creating the world’s first art-focused wealth advice offering for Christie’s; working as part of the team that formed Barclays Wealth and heading the McKinsey UK Savings and Investment Group.Steven founded Bought By Many, which is disrupting the world of pet insurance through the innovative use of tech, and is building a business to become an irresistible employer that is obsessive about customer service.In April 2019 Steven was included in the London Business School Review of 30 People Who Are Changing The World. https://boughtbymany.com/    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.  Twitter: SabineVdL LinkedIn: Sabine VanderLinden Instagram: sabinevdLofficial Facebook: SabineVdLOfficial TikTok: sabinevdlofficial Email: podcast@sabinevdl.com Website: www.sabinevdl.com

On this episode, Sabine VdL interviews Helene Panzarino, author of Reinventing banking and finance, A Framework to navigate global FinTech innovation which was published in November 2020 on Amazon. The pair discuss the book and the key insight Helene provides to reinvent the banking business model.   KEY TAKEAWAYS We assume banking has always been what banking is today. In the early days (1200s Italy) hyper-personalisation was going on for aristocrats and the like, now FinTech is the full circle back to hyper-personalisation but we’re doing it at scale, digitally. The industrial revolution had a very big impact on banking, as it did on every other aspect of society and economy. There’s now mass-servicing which took away some of the personalisation and the individuality of banking which intensified through the IT side of banking in the 1950s where we were able to use technology to store and process more data as well as begin to give more products and services to a wider audience. The more recent digital revolution and the internet allowed us to do our banking online and the smartphone brought that to its apex so you have a bank in your pocket. In five years’ time, we’ll be able to DIY our own bank and choose between different products and services, this is where FinTech will come into its own. It took banking ages to realise that the threat that came from outside, posed by the insurance industry, was greater than the threat coming from inside. Insurance and InsurTechs had a much better collaborative partnership relationship from the get-go, whereas banks and FinTechs were adversaries. FinTechs have now grown up and are aware that they need their parents if they’re going to scale and they’re working very well collaboratively now, but I applaud the insurance industry for getting there first.    BEST MOMENTS ‘Everyone must now have a global view, no one can stay confined in his/her geographical space.’ ‘The pandemic has shown us the inadequacies for some banks’ desktops, platforms and apps. Consumers are now using those apps, including the non-digital natives who used to visit banking branches in person and weren’t used to digital engagements.’ ‘If you’ve created a startup bank, you need to remember that you’re operating In a regulated industry and if you ‘colour outside of the lines’ the regulator is going to come down on you. So, make sure to bring in experienced people to your C-Suite or Board.’ ‘Everyone knows how to innovate, but everyone does not know how to execute. You need to be given space and the finance to fail. It needs to be OK and not damaging to your growth path or career prospects if you’re going to fail too. Acceptance of different growth paths need to be accepted from the top, if that openness doesn’t permeate from the top-down then nobody’s going to try to grow smartly or differently.’   ABOUT THE GUEST Originally a Commercial Banker, Helene is an experienced FinTech Programme Director, exited entrepreneur, educator, and author.  Her book ‘Reinventing Banking and Finance: Frameworks to navigate global FinTech innovation’  came out in Sept 2020, https://www.amazon.in/Reinventing-Banking-Finance-Frameworks-Innovation/dp/1789664098  Previously the MD of the global Rainmaking Colab FinTech Programme, a world-first, post-accelerator program for Series A+ FinTechs and Tier 1 financial institutions, Helene was also responsible for the Inaugural Programme of Education and Events for Innovate Finance. She is an Associate Director of the LIBF Digital Banking Centre, the Lead Fellow, and creator on a world-first FinTech Pathway in a Masters in Tech Entrepreneurship Degree for UCL, and co-creator and lead delivery partner on the Imperial College FinTech Executive Education Programme. Her specialist subject areas are Digital Banking and Alternative Finance (SMEs). She is also the CEO of the New Financial Laboratory enabling community banks and building societies to engage with the global FinTech community.  A regular judge, speaker, and moderator for the banking and FinTech awards and conferences, Helene was a BSI FinTech representative for the UK in Brussels, named on the Computer Weekly 100 Women in Tech Award 2018-19 and on the Innovate Finance Women in FinTech Power List for 2019. You can discover more about Helene's book here > reinventing banking and finance.    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.  Twitter: SabineVdL LinkedIn: Sabine VanderLinden Instagram: sabinevdLofficial Facebook: SabineVdLOfficial TikTok: sabinevdlofficial Email: podcast@sabinevdl.com Website: www.sabinevdl.com  

On this episode, Sabine VdL interviews Spiros Margaris who discusses the pros and cons of working for a young venture, setting up a startup, as well as the best way to succeed in business. He shares insights on the future of FinTech and much more. KEY TAKEAWAYS You build trust with founders by telling them what you think, honestly, but not always expecting them to do what you say. Trust is the basis of working together and with trust anyone can go far, even in difficult times. You have to play to your strengths. If somebody asks you questions – and startups will – and you don’t know the answer, you need to say you don’t know. But then call someone in your network that has expertise and will know the answer. A startup engagement is like any "relationship": you will have great times, you will have mediocre times, you will have bad times. It won’t always be this exciting thing people think of. Even if the job you do is extremely boring and repetitive, whichever job that is, that’s what will make you good at that job long term. The future of FinTech is embedded finance. Even non-financial companies will go into this space with trusted partners or develop their own FinTech solution, which will complement their existing offerings even better. They don’t need to make money through finance, unlike banks. The finance ‘cake’ is going to be split into more ways in the future, including financial offers and non-financial offers.   BEST MOMENTS ‘It’s a privilege to be recognised by your community, but at the end of the day, you’re only as good as your community. We grow together.’ ‘Winning is about teamwork: Together we win, like a football team.’ ‘Great young people want to work in great companies that give them responsibilities and let their voice be heard. They’re not so bothered about money yet. They want purpose.’ ‘The nice thing about my job is that I talk to so many smart people. This means that I keep learning. Think about our world as a fantastic international digital school!’   ABOUT THE GUEST Spiros Margaris is a venture capitalist, futurist, keynote speaker and senior advisor. He is the first international influencer to achieve ‘The Triple Crown’ FinTech ranking. He was ranked the international № 1 FinTech, Blockchain, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) influencer (05/2018) by Onalytica. Spiros once again was ranked the global № 1 Fintech influencer (02/2020) by Onalytica. He regularly appears in the top three positions of established global industry influencer rankings.  He is a keynote speaker at international FinTech, and InsurTech conferences. He also gave a TEDxAcademy Talk. He published an AI white paper, “Machine learning in financial services: Changing the rules of the game,” for the enterprise software vendor SAP. First non-IBM Keynote Speaker at the biggest IBM event in Europe “2019 IBM Systems Technical University” among others.   Twitter: @SpirosMargaris  Linkedin: Spiros Margaris  www.margarisventures.com Linkedin link: https://www.linkedin.com/in/spirosmargaris/ Twitter Link: https://twitter.com/SpirosMargaris Website Link: https://www.margarisventures.com/ Keynote Speaking Agent: www.gspeakers.com   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.  Twitter: SabineVdL LinkedIn: Sabine VanderLinden Instagram: sabinevdLofficial Facebook: SabineVdLOfficial TikTok: sabinevdlofficial Email: podcast@sabinevdl.com Website: www.sabinevdl.com  

On this episode, Sabine VdL reviews the four types of investment and who is winning the corporate venturing game as well as looking to the future to evaluate and imagine what is coming our way.   KEY TAKEAWAYS The four types of investment strategies: ‘Driving’ (strategic and tightly linked to operational capabilities), ‘Enabling’ (strategic and loosely liked to operational capabilities), ‘Emerging’ (tightly linked to metrics of financial importance), and ‘Passive’ (loosest connected to corporate capabilities and strategies). Winners at corporate venturing during the ‘Startup Phase’ have been identified as having 3 core elements: A clear and defined vision that drives a clear charter and operating model; A strong and experienced team that combines both internal operational knowledge and external understanding of the Venture Capitalist’s drivers; Established expectations and milestones to measure and ensure performance. Winners at corporate venturing during the ‘Expansion Phase’ are seen to have a slightly different set of core components: Agility in how they refine strategic investment or the focus of the portfolio; Tailored approaches to recruiting and retaining the Corporate Venturing team over time; Institutionalization of the Corporate Venturing operating platform. Winners during the “Resiliency Phase” have found ways to industrialize and democratize their learnings. They have been identified as having the following common characteristics: The Corporate Venturing program plays a strategic role and continually influences parent growth; There are purpose-built well-established end-to-end investment platforms; They have intelligent community management and communications capabilities.   BEST MOMENTS ‘Consider Driving and Enabling investment paths at the earliest stage of formation, moving to Emergent investment. This means that Passive investment in the latter stages of the CVC model and probably the best option to drive long-term financial returns.’ ‘CSAA Insurance Group, for instance, provides insurance products across a range of personal areas to AAA members as they built their own Corporate Venturing arm.’ ‘Having an agile platform is crucial’ ‘Innovations are creating seismic scale changes to our business landscape across multiple big industries. These evolutions and changes are  made possible through corporate venturing.’   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.  Twitter: SabineVdL LinkedIn: Sabine VanderLinden Instagram: sabinevdLofficial Facebook: SabineVdLOfficial TikTok: sabinevdlofficial Email: podcast@sabinevdl.com Website: www.sabinevdl.com

On this episode, Sabine VdL interviews Sam Evans, a Founding Partner with Eos Venture Partners, who has spent the last four years investing in InsurTech startups. He is an active speaker and top 50 InsurTech influencer.  Prior to establishing Eos, Sam was a partner at KPMG where he led the Global Deal Advisory business for insurance. During his career, Sam has worked on over $75bn of insurance-related transactions and has worked in many of the large mature and high growth insurance markets around the globe. Sam lived in great countries and locations including Australia, Hong Kong, and Switzerland. Today, Sam lives in the UK.   KEY TAKEAWAYS There’s so much happening, it’s a super exciting time. One of the key areas for us at Eos is in relation to the digital economy and the gig economy. First, it’s difficult to properly serve the gig economy worker with traditional insurance solutions because they’re not usage-based, not connected, and often backwards-looking. Still, the gig economy worker has become a huge and growing market, especially off the back of the pandemic. It’s also underserved. Second, the ability to transition from protection to prevention within life and health, leveraging technology to proactively manage risk and embed medical, health and fitness technologies to prevent the deterioration of conditions. Third, think about emerging risk classes such as cybersecurity risk combined with embedded insurance mechanisms, these new risk classes are increasingly coming to market. The pandemic has accelerated the industry’s adoption of ‘digital’ by at least five years, which is quite a staggering statistic. Demand from pretty much all our portfolio companies has increased significantly, so we’re seeing it in real-time. The industry’s maturity has also accelerated; overall fundraising levels are increasing but they’re being more and more dominated by a smaller number of companies making larger rounds. The first half of 2021 saw more funding than the whole of 2020, so we’re still on a very significant upwards trajectory in terms of appetite and capital flowing in. We are in an environment with inflated valuations too. The InsurTech bubble hasn’t burst yet. It’s deflating though, and this may not necessarily be a bad thing. It’s all part of the maturing journey of a sector.  There’s a significant amount of capital looking to be deployed against excellent business models. We’re always keen to talk to companies that are either on the path to or have reached the series A stage. If you look at the market as a whole, we’re at least 10 years behind FinTech in development, so we’re still at a very early stage of development. This is going to be something that dominates the industry for the next 20-30 years, this is a fundamental change and shift in how insurance operates.   BEST MOMENTS ‘Key to our philosophy is working in partnership with the industry, rather than adopting a pure challenger model, which is where we saw the greatest value could be created.’ ‘Connected vehicle insurance enhances safety by improving driving quality and highlighting accident hotspots. Insurers today get better results as they can use the data to enhance risk selection and pricing.’ ‘A lot of InsurTech startups are going to struggle and fail. That’s part of the natural evolution of a sector. I think Covid-19 has accelerated that to a certain degree due to the fight for quality, and the lookout for those startups that are likely to do particularly well.’ ‘Incumbents shouldn’t see regulation as something that’s going to protect them from new entrants. We’ve seen, even in our small portfolio, companies moving from an MGA into a full-stack model with the blessing of the regulator.’   ABOUT THE GUEST Sam is a founding partner of Eos Venture Partners, a Strategic InsurTech Venture Capital fund with offices in London and Philadelphia. Eos is an independent specialist InsurTech investment and advisory business. Eos is today a Series A and Series B investor with a focus on new business models and new technologies that will impact and transform the insurance industry. Eos provides financing and advisory services to leading entrepreneurs building innovative businesses in the insurance sector. In partnership with RAW Capital Partners, Eos offers a unique solution for growth stage InsurTech companies. Founders are choosing to work with Eos because it is an independent specialist and active InsurTech investor with a strong track record and excellent relationships across the insurance sector. https://www.eosventurepartners.com/    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.  Twitter: SabineVdL LinkedIn: Sabine VanderLinden Instagram: sabinevdLofficial Facebook: SabineVdLOfficial TikTok: sabinevdlofficial Email: podcast@sabinevdl.com Website: www.sabinevdl.com

On this episode, Sabine VdL interviews Florian Graillot, an investor and co-founder of Astorya.vc or Astorya. Astorya invests in Seed InsurTech startups across Europe. In this conversation the pair cover topics including who he is, why he started Astorya and how he sees the world of corporate venturing today and tomorrow.   KEY TAKEAWAYS There is a trend beginning where there is direct competition between Tier 1 insurance players and reinsurance companies working directly with InsurTech startups able to bypass specific insurance providers across the value chain. The latter has a massive impact on how the market is being restructured behind the scenes.  Florian built Astorya with co-founder Jan Kastory because he saw a gap in the market. As an investor, Florian shares that Astorya’s focus is investing in entrepreneurs first, utilising his team’s financial and entrepreneurial background. Because of this context, it makes sense that Astorya attracts great tech entrepreneurs. At Astorya, Florian states "we understand how to grow businesses as we do just that ourselves every day." FinTech investors only commit 10% of their time to InsurTech. Astorya only does InsurTech explains Florian, meaning that 100% of Astorya’s time is dedicated to insurance tech ventures. And this is why Astorya’s limited partners invested in the firm. The Limited Partners know that the Astorya team will spend 100% of its time on the InsurTech topic every single day of the week.  Don’t be afraid of what you read in the newspapers. There are still a lot of opportunities to address in InsurTech, not everything has been done yet. The full insurance value chain needs to be unbundled, re-bundled and revamped and InsurTech startups can address this in numbers. We already have a few unicorns within the InsurTech space. Don’t forget that technology is a means to an end but without it, it becomes tougher and tougher to succeed in any industry. Today, technology becomes your competitive edge over traditional insurance companies.   BEST MOMENTS ‘InsurTech is way broader than just insurance. It can be connected to almost any industry.’ ‘Tech investment is in my DNA, insurance is much more opportunistic.’ ‘There’s always somebody who is managing more money than you. It’s not about money, it’s about the industry, focus, understanding and capacity to accelerate go-to-market strategies, especially around software or B2B technologies.’ ‘It may be very easy to raise money at the very beginning of the startup journey, or when you are big enough to attract a huge round from private equity investors, but when you are in the middle, it’s still challenging. I believe that both entrepreneurs and corporates should keep that in mind.’   ABOUT THE GUEST Florian Graillot is a founding partner and VC investor at Astorya.vc where he invests in early-stage tech startups in Europe. His main focus is to identify, evaluate and invest in the growth ventures that utilise the next generation of customer-centric technologies that will reinvent insurance. His skills include investment, financial modelling, entrepreneurship, business development, and strategy. http://astorya.vc/    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.  Twitter: SabineVdL LinkedIn: Sabine VanderLinden Instagram: sabinevdLofficial Facebook: SabineVdLOfficial TikTok: sabinevdlofficial Email: podcast@sabinevdl.com Website: www.sabinevdl.com

In this episode, Sabine VdL is joined by Matthew Jones, Managing Director and venture capital investor in insurance and risk management-related technology for Anthemis in the UK, Europe, and North America. Through his previous work with Swiss Re, Matthew sponsored Sabine’s first accelerator and was one of her most active mentors, engaged assessor, and investor. They both learned massively during the acceleration programme as to what a sustainable business model meant.   KEY TAKEAWAYS At the core of our investment thesis are banks, insurance companies, and FinTech companies. But in addition to those kinds of businesses, we’re also actively researching, exploring, and investing in several adjacent industries where we believe that the technology will intersect with financial services in the future, including energy, agriculture, mobility, health, and property tech. For me, cultivating change means that we’re prepared to back genuinely different and disruptive ideas that others aren’t. Because our team comes from partly inside and partly outside financial services, we try to blend those two different perspectives into thinking creatively about how we back new companies and under-represented founders. Within the context of venturing, there’s a rule of thumb that startups should target a 10x better experience for the user or a 10x better return on investment. That’s a good rule of thumb. And across financial services, there are so many underdeveloped spots where growth ventures can focus on delivering that kind of outcome. Entrepreneurs that seek funding should seek smart money. They should ask their investors what they believe in, and how they put it into practice. They should evaluate their investment team and the partners too: Are they a diverse bunch? Do they have values that align with yours and are they putting them into practice? Would you want to affiliate yourself with a firm that doesn’t have the same values as yours?   BEST MOMENTS ‘Without insurance and re-insurance nothing really happens. Insurance is everywhere, which is great for me as someone who’s a little bit obsessive about insurance.’ ‘Financial services is the lifeblood of the world’s economies. But we recognise it’s not perfect and there are opportunities for improvement.’ ‘There is no part of the insurance value chain that is immune to the effect of technology.’ ‘There’s no excuse, and it’s not acceptable, for big venture capital companies to have all male and all white CEO portfolio companies. We are in the 21st Century!’   ABOUT THE GUEST Matthew is a Managing Director at Anthemis, where he is responsible for sourcing, analyzing, and executing investments as well as providing support for Anthemis’ portfolio companies. He brings in-depth knowledge of the insurance sector and focuses on investments in insurance and risk-related technology. Matthew’s areas of interest include analytics and data, artificial intelligence and automation, asset management, digital health, mobility, new insurance propositions, and risk management. Prior to joining Anthemis, Matthew was at Swiss Re, with roles across non-life and life insurance and reinsurance in both London and Zurich. Matthew previously served on the boards of Flock, Hokodo and Stable and is the resident venture investor for Carrier Management’s VC Viewpoint series. He holds a bachelor’s in business administration from the University of Bath and also studied at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. https://www.anthemis.com/    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.  Twitter: SabineVdL LinkedIn: Sabine VanderLinden Instagram: sabinevdLofficial Facebook: SabineVdLOfficial TikTok: sabinevdlofficial Email: podcast@sabinevdl.com Website: www.sabinevdl.com

On this episode, Sabine VdL defines what venture scouting, also called technology scouting means and why companies and investors see it as so important. She also discusses what skillsets a technology scout needs to succeed as well as what should motivate them and how these strategies are delivered.   KEY TAKEAWAYS In recent months companies around the globe have seen new types of challenges affecting them all, including: changing customer needs (such as the "I want it now" generation demanding reduced engagement friction); rising competition (This does not only means the fast-moving dominance of BigTech, but also the arrival of new digital market entrants.); and increasing market volatility (Think about bitcoins and other digital currencies that have fluctuated up and down). Many companies see it as essential to closely monitor developments in core technologies and scan for emerging technologies with disruptive potential. Methods here include technological forecasting, technology foresight and technology intelligence. The basis of technology scouting is about enhancing the insight provided on emerging and advanced technologies and lowering the time lag between technological advancement and detection, accelerating the potential delivery of unfair competitive advantages for any company. One of the biggest obstacles to innovation is often the regional limitations and the siloed way of thinking that exist in many corporations today. They know though that to remain competitive, they need to acquire valuable information on emerging technologies the earliest as possible.   BEST MOMENTS ‘Strong technological competence plays a crucial role in maintaining and improving a company's competitive position, regardless of business size.’ ‘In an environment impacted by technological complexity and the globalization of R&D activities, the successful identification, and usage of external sources of knowledge is becoming increasingly essential and primordial as part of a business success strategy.’ ‘Technology scouts require lateral thinking, knowledge in science and technology, a certain level of credibility, recognition within the company, cross-disciplinary orientation, creativity, and imagination.’ ‘Think about venture/technology scouting as an early warning system for companies to make better innovation choices.’   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.  Twitter: SabineVdL LinkedIn: Sabine VanderLinden Instagram: sabinevdLofficial Facebook: SabineVdLOfficial TikTok: sabinevdlofficial Email: podcast@sabinevdl.com Website: www.sabinevdl.com