Insurance and protection-as-a-service company Setoo has closed an €8 million (£7.8m) Series A funding round as it prepares to expand across Europe.
The main investor in the seed round is Kamet, AXA’s InsurTech start-up studio. The funds bring the total amount raised to date to €10.3 million (±$12 million).
Setoo is disrupting the insurance market by enabling online businesses to create and sell great protection tailored to the consumers’ needs and fit for the digital age.
For example, an online travel agent (OTA) selling connecting flights from multiple airlines can provide insurance to cover missed flight connections if preceding flights are delayed or cancelled.
In these situations, Setoo sends an automated SMS to the consumer on behalf of the OTA, explaining that a full refund has been provided and offering alternative flight suggestions.
In another scenario, a tour operator selling ski holidays could insure against lack of snow, fully automating payment and removing the hassle of the claims process for the customer.
In today’s digital world consumers expect businesses to provide services that are tailored to their exact needs and deliver a great customer experience.
Whilst consumers need to buy protection for certain assets, they are increasingly unwilling to spend money on what they see as irrelevant insurance products that don’t meet their needs.
Setoo is solving this problem by empowering businesses, which understand their consumers best, to quickly and easily build and integrate tailor-made, simple insurance products that are automatically embedded into the customer journey.
Businesses benefit from one-click underwriting directly on their digital assets and providing personalised protection with automatic compensation for their consumers.
The highly scalable InsurTech platform covers risks that relate to exogenous events that could ruin the customer journey.
Insurance companies that partner with Setoo benefit from working with the brands employing some of the best marketers in the world, who design and distribute new protections that are highly consumer-centric and innovative.
“Our investment in Setoo supports AXA’s strategy to build more impactful insurance platforms as one of our four key priorities for innovation and to become a partner for the end customer,” said AXA chief innovation officer Guillaume Borie.
“Setoo’s platform enables digital businesses to create, through automation, new types of insurance that are more relevant to consumers. Drawing on our expertise, Setoo is building a fantastic on-demand platform that will future-proof its clients’ businesses.”
Setoo co-CEO Noam Shapira said: “Setoo stands for simplicity – in French ‘c’est tout’ means ‘that’s it’.
“My co-founder Eyal Gluska and I chose the name to symbolise how simple and quick it is to create effective new protection products using the platform, and the simplicity of the products created for the consumer.
“This investment from Kamet is key to helping us expand across the EU and build further new products to empower more businesses to take control of insurance for their consumers.”