Startup accelerator woes

Rationalizing

Hi there,

Thanks for all your comments from last week on startups going through multiple accelerators.

From the startup perspective, we received responses highlighting publicity, paid pilots, and choosing programs that did not include an equity component.

Others took a different view. One investor pinned it on the difficulty for B2B startups to sell into insurers, writing:

I think that many startups that are going B2B to sell to incumbents are finding it much harder than anticipated to complete sales due to the challenges in working with incumbents.

Paid pilots are one thing, but operationalizing is very different. In spite of all the talk of innovation by incumbents, I think it is still a challenge for most to actually engage with and purchase from startups beyond pilot.  Second, in my experience, even if an incumbent decides to operationalize the legacy back office make it incredibly difficult to integrate with newer solutions. Legacy insurers’ IT stack is a mess and integration becomes near impossible I think in many cases. 

Put all this together—long time to get to pilots, long time for decision from pilot to operationalize and really difficult integration—results in startups going through multiple accelerators. 

Top of mind

Our patent search surfaced an interesting patent granted to Allstate this week titled, “Altering autonomous or semi-autonomous vehicle operation based on route traversal values.”

We’ve added it to our post on autonomous vehicle-related patents by insurers.

Diversifying

Last week, we mentioned Zhong An Insurance, last valued at $8B, might be fast-tracked to a China listing. Now, it looks like China’s first online-only insurer is hoping to raise an additional $1.45B.

More interesting is that Zhong An continues to broaden its focus away from shipping returns insurance, which was revealed to now account for 50% of its business, down from 77% in 2014.

Have a great rest of the week,

Matt
@mlcwong

P.S. We put together a high-level presentation on areas of insurance tech startup formation and investment for LendIt this week. Get the presentation here.