Zego
- London-based insurtech firm Zego has secured $42 million in series B funding to boost its European expansion plans.
- The company covers much of the gig economy’s insurance needs with flexible insurance plans.
- VC funds such as Balderton Capital, Latitude, and Target Global contributed while TransferWise co-founder Taavet Hinrikus also invested and joins the company’s board.
Investors have piled in to fund yet another UK fintech as the market for insurance disruption gets even bigger.
London-based insurtech firm Zego has secured $42 million in series B funding to boost its European expansion plans. The success of food delivery companies like Deliveroo, which recently secured $575 million in funding from Amazon, and Uber Eats in the UK has led to a boom in demand for new forms of insurance for the gig economy.
Zego is a startup, founded by serial entrepreneur Sten Saar, which provides flexible insurance products ranging from minute-to-minute to annual cover.
It takes the company’s funding to $51 million overall, with previous investors Balderton Capital and Tom Stafford of fund DST Global joining the latest financing alongside new money from Latitude, Target Global, and Taavet Hinrikus the co-founder of $3.5 billion valued startup TransferWise.
"Zego’s growth has been impressive, and they are a genuinely different insurance proposition," said Rob Moffat, a Balderton Capital partner and Google alum who has backed companies including Citymapper.
Moffat said in an interview: "It was a competitive funding round, but we’re happy with the valuation and we’ve doubled down again after also investing last year."
Zego will use the funding to double its headcount from 75 to 150 by adding to its staff in its current offices in the UK, Ireland, and Spain. The company is set to expand its offerings into France next, Saar added, with those plans expected to in place by the end of 2019 at the latest.
"This is one of the largest insurtech fundings this year and we’re in a sweet spot in terms of getting demand from around the world," Saar said in an interview with Business Insider. "We said, ‘Let’s scale globally,’ we wanted to get the right partners to do that and the new investors are specialists in scaling up businesses."
Target Global’s Partner Ben Kaminski and Hinrikus will join Zego’s board. Hinrikus is a "big asset to the business" Saar said.
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Source: Business Insider – cburroughs@businessinsider.com (Callum Burroughs)