Analyzing insurer patents. Google's insurance investments. This week in insurance tech.
Coming soon
Hi there,
Last week, we launched patent data and patent search on the CB Insights platform. We’ll soon be using the patent data to post different analyses around insurance and various emerging technologies.
Stay tuned.
Lateral movement
This week, German mobile banking startup N26 announced its expansion to 17 countries in Europe, after partnering with Allianz travel insurance in October.
We have seen some existing fintech startups move closer to insurance this year. We earlier chatted with SoFi’s Andrea Blankmeyer about its insurance plans and last month, Credit Karma, which this week introduced a tax prep service, added a new carrier appointment with Mercury Insurance.
Mo’ money
This week’s $34M Series B to Lemonade led by General Catalyst ranks as the third largest investment round in 2016 YTD for a P&C insurance tech startup after Metromile and Cyence.
The investment, which brings Lemonade’s total funding to $60M, comes as the startup looks to expand beyond the New York homeowners, renters, and condo insurance market to California where it has filed for a license. For quick context, renters and condo insurance premiums in California totaled nearly $700M vs. $328M in New York, per 2013 NAIC data.
Among Lemonade’s backers is XL Innovate, which also partook in a $14M financing this year to Cape Analytics, which provides data analytics using aerial images to home insurers. Another is Google’s GV, which combined with CapitalG, have made the following insurance-related investments since the start of last year:
Fun with data
Our “Hack Day” is today, where team members are given 24 hours to work on any CB Insights-related project of their choosing.
This includes playing with lots of data sets. Here’s a fun data visualization from Alex, a product manager on our team, plotting the Wikipedia article revision activity over time of “peer-to-peer lending” and the more contentious “peer-to-peer insurance.” (The red line tracks revisions over time).