September 15, 2023

SureIn - When Safe Can Also Be Sexy

A new wave of InsurTech drives impact for SMBs

Today, we are proud to announce our investment in Berlin-based SureIn to address the gap in the SMB insurance market. SureIn is changing the way SMBs in Germany are able to access and purchase business insurance via a proprietary platform offering an end-to-end insurance infrastructure based on the needs of the customers they are serving. Insurance is sexy again!

At Pact, we see a huge opportunity for tech to empower SMBs and provide tools to compete with larger incumbents who typically have access to more resources and funding. This is one of the key sub-sectors we focus on under our theme ‘Access’. Size (doesn’t just) matter. The difference between enterprise and SMBs doesn’t just come down to the number of employees they have, it comes down to the roles they play in the economy. SMBs are the backbone of the European economy as they make up 99 percent of all businesses, accounting for more than half of the GDP across the market. Yet they are severely ignored by most providers, including insurers. I remember as a 14 year old native English speaker in an immigrant family, I had to take out employer’s liability insurance for my father’s shop in Holloway Road as it was a minefield to navigate (which is something most immigrant kids can relate to). This isn’t an uncommon problem, as 20% of entrepreneurs are migrants, starting 170,000 new businesses a year in Germany alone. This makes the case of the market needing an easy-to-use and accessible insurance platform even more critical.

Fast forward to 2020, when local businesses had to close up shop due to the pandemic, SMBs are realising the importance of having adequate coverage and understanding exactly what they are covered for and what they are not. The impact of having the wrong coverage may be a small statistic for large incumbents, but it can make or break people’s livelihoods at the other end. Deloitte recently highlighted that 33% of SMBs are willing to pay more for their insurance premiums to have adequate coverage. Not only did the pandemic highlight the absolute need to have the right coverage, it also drove SMBs to rapidly adopt tech and digitise their businesses in order to weather the next storm, should it happen.

Germany is a country that is proud of its Mittelstand, which is the country’s strongest driver of innovation and tech. This is evident in SureIn’s traction since its launch in 2022, where they have expanded into multiple industries and have quickly generated over €1M in gross written premiums. The company has supported a range of businesses of different sizes and has almost 1,000 SMBs clients in a short amount of time. As there are 24 million SMBs in Europe, the market is ripe for disruption, and SureIn is the team to do this.

Despite the €400bn market opportunity, insurance companies in Europe tend to overlook SMBs due to them having a higher risk profile compared to larger companies and susceptibility to market fluctuations. SureIn addresses this by automatically monitoring and adjusting customers’ risk profiles periodically to ensure they have the right type of coverage as their business evolves. Current insurance providers also struggle to deal with the complexity of customisation as not all SMBs are the same and have diverse needs. Tailoring insurance products to suit their specific requirements can be more difficult and time-consuming than offering standardised policies to larger companies through old-school and manual processes. SureIn manages to overcome this by having unique insight into the company’s day-to-day operations based on the data they collect and using AI to provide the best premium on the market. They also tackle the distribution problem by partnering with MGAs and having an intuitive platform so that SMBs are able to access insurance products directly and know that they are getting the best offer on the market.

David, Max, and Daniel from SureIn

Saying this, as any investor knows, it is all about the team at the early stage. Daniel, David and Max have all worked together in the past and have an encyclopaedic knowledge of the insurance sector. Daniel first realised this untapped opportunity during his time at Signal Iduna, a large insurance company where, in his role as Head of Partnerships, he realised that the products they had on offer were not suitable or tailored for SMBs. Daniel took his entrepreneurial spirit and launched an incubator for InsurTech startups backed by his former employer before deciding to build a business from the ground up.

This is where David and Max enter. We don’t always ask for companies to have multiple founders but when you get an experienced team of three that is incredibly complimentary, we knew this was a recipe for success. As CPO, David is making use of his 15+ years of experience in building digital products as a tech and product leader. At Zenjob, he built a product for SMBs and deeply understands the specific needs and dynamics of combining a B2C customer experience with a B2B product. Max is an experienced operational and commercial leader, taking charge as COO to build SureIn in the most (German) and capital-efficient way possible. Having spent his whole career in fast-paced businesses and hyper-growth environments, Max built and scaled AutoHero from scratch (the highly successful Auto1 Group’s B2C product).

If you’re constantly reading about the impending doom and gloom of both the private and public markets, it is an opportune time for founders to focus on the fundamentals of business — build a beautiful product that your customers can’t live without and do it in a capital efficient way while targeting the P word. Profitability. Sounds easier said than done, but it is possible, and we are here to back those founders who are solving fundamental problems that have a wider stakeholder impact.

Thanks to George Robson at Sequoia for his insight and backing the SureIn team from day one, along with Atlantic Labs. And what an incredible line-up of investors the team has brought together — German VC fund xDeck, GPs Warrick Shanly (Koro Capital) and Robin Haak (Robin Capital), and multiple renowned FinTech and InsurTech angels, including the exited founder of Gabi Insurance, Vincenz Klemm, and Estelle Merle of Topi.