INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
People procrastinate about buying insurance because it such a boring and complicated chore to compare policies
But Cover combines plans from 45 insurance companies into a single marketplace so it easy to find the best one for your car, home, rental,
business, personal property, pets, jewelry and more
Now Cover is building powerful onboarding tricks like a driving school that earns you lower car insurance rates, and a way for Shopify
merchants to sell warranties for their items.The potential to use tech to run circles around the old insurance brokers has attracted a new
$16 million Series B for Cover led by Tribe Capital Arjun Sethi, who led the Series A and sits on the startup board
The round was joined byY Combinator, Social Capital, Exor and Samsung, and brings the company to a total of $27.1 million in
funding.&Insurance isn&t very different from being a white-collar bookie, where the house rake is too high and the dollars at stake are in
the hundreds of billions in the U.S
alone,& says co-founder and CEOKarn Saroya
&This, all to the detriment of regular people, who view insurance as a tax
We&re here to change that perception.&Saroya and his co-founders have deep ties
He went to high school withAnand Dhillon, is engaged to Natalie Gray and hired Ben Aneesh at the team previous startup, a high-end fashion
marketplace called StyleKick that was eventually acqui-hired by Shopify
&We were tossing around ideas for what we wanted to do after StyleKick/Shopify, running hackathons on weekends
We built a couple different apps, but Cover — the MVP, where we just asked potential customers to take pictures of things they wanted to
insure, surprised us& says Saroya
&Our customers sent us walkthroughs of their homes, pictures of their dogs and videos of themselves washing their cars
When you come across behavior that violates your expectations in consumers, that usually when you double-down.&Cover co-founder and CEO Karn
SaroyaSo they built Cover, where you don&t have to cobble together an endless set of insurance websites or wait on hold
You download the app, pick your item, list how much you paid and where, provide some photos or video of its condition using its
TensorFlow-equipped camera and Cover will check across its insurance partners and find you the best quote instantly
You can easily see what is and isn&t covered, learn how to make claims, and text with an agent if you have questions
For example, I was quickly quoted $5 per month to insure my new iPhone against damage but not loss or theft.Cover earns between 10 to35
percent per dollar of premium you pay
Its annualized premium already exceeds $8.5 million and is growing 30 percent per month
Thanks to its low-churn business model, easy cross-promotion of products, low training requirements for customers and no need to constantly
update its existing subscriptions, Cover starts to look like a very efficient software-as-a-service business.The big question remains
whether Cover can consistently find the best rates for customers so they don&t second guess its quotes and search somewhere else
It will have to outcompete multi-insurance providers, like State Farm and Geico, as well as startups like MetroMile tackling specific
insurance verticals with mobile apps
To really earn the big profits, Cover is building out its own in-house insurance plans
But that will put it under constant threat of insuring the wrong risks and ending up paying out too much.&We built Cover because we saw an
opportunity to build elegant products that could deliver on pricing and customer experience in a way that no incumbent insurance entity
By bringing the service to mobile and making it a seamless part of owning something, Cover could ensure you&re insured, even if insurance is
the last thing you want to think about.
