Tracking Swiss Re and Munich Re's startup moves. This week in insurance tech.
Taking talents to…
Hi there,
First, thanks to InsureTech Connect for a great inaugural event. We’ve had a lot of requests from our slide deck overview from the conference, which you can find here.
One of the topics that came up quite a bit was hiring. This week, Lemonade hired former Liberty Mutual executive John Peters as its chief underwriting officer and other startups have hired underwriting and insurance talent from QBE, AIG, and more.
On the latter two, one of the more active giants in the space to date has been Munich Re and its subsidiaries. This includes:
Underwriting partnerships: With Trov, Slice, Simplesurance, and others. Munich has also been active on the partnership front in areas like drones and mobility.
Investments: Through Munich Re/HSB Ventures
M&A: Hartford Steam Boiler acquired device and information management startup Meshify this week.
In tracking venture and strategic investments across the insurance space, we caught an interesting transaction this week as Dragoneer Investment Group took a 35% stake in AmWINS Group, last year ranked the largest wholesale broker in the US.
Dragoneer has been among the crossover hedge funds in private tech investing with a portfolio spanning the likes of Instacart, Airbnb, Wealthfront, and Flipkart. On its AmWINs stake, Dragoneer founder Marc Stad says he “firmly believes there is tremendous opportunity ahead as technology plays a bigger role in the business.”
P.P.S. An upcoming newsletter will feature a bit on insurance tech during the dotcom boom/bust. If you have any anecdotes/stories, please reply back to this email.
