Rethink / Entrepreneurship / A unique approach to InsurTech: Announcing our investment in Sayata
Entrepreneurship

A unique approach to InsurTech: Announcing our investment in Sayata

Sarit Firon August 26, 2021
Sayata Product Rethink

Insurance is a huge domain, and we have seen a large number of digital companies trying to disrupt it. According to PitchBook, VCs are investing heavily in InsurTech – some $4.5 billion across 160 deals in the second quarter of 2021 alone, a quarterly record. The new companies in this space tend to work either as digital providers of insurance to certain niches, or they are looking to provide existing insurers with better actuarial models through data analysis.

Our recent $17 million series A investment in Sayata (along with Vertex Ventures) is taking a different approach to radically alter this industry. Sayata is a marketplace for insurance brokers to find the best coverage for their small and midsize business (SMB) customers. Having initially focused on cyber insurance, Sayata is now expanding to multiple different lines.

The process for taking out SMB commercial insurance is woefully antiquated – despite the fact that in the US alone the size of the market is more than $100 billion a year. Typically, insurance brokers are responsible for finding the best coverage for their clients. Yet, the process of finding and securing this coverage is inefficient, time-consuming, and painfully manual – with brokers having to manually search and compare many policies, which can take hours and days. Sayata optimizes these cumbersome processes, allowing brokers to focus on their clients while dramatically enhancing their ability to secure more coverage.

Sayata has been wildly successful, growing by 30% month over month for the last year in cyber insurance coverage alone. The Sayata team blends decades of insurance experience and technology expertise to deliver its vision of being a true one-stop solution for all SMBs’ insurance needs. 

Sayata has a number of differentiators, which make it such an attractive investment for us: 

  • Creating a modern insurance marketplace – Sayata realized that there is a huge market that is working in a very old-fashioned way, namely the interplay between clients, brokers, retail agents, and insurance companies, which is still phone and email based, repetitive, and thus painstakingly slow. Introducing smart technology into the mix creates a win for all sides.
  • Streamlining policy search and comparison – A unique differentiator is that for the first time Sayata allows its clients to automatically compare complex insurance policies instead of manually searching for, making sense of and comparing insurance policies – a laborious and often impossible task.
  • Speeding up policy placement –  With Sayata, brokers can now find, compare and package insurance quotes in minutes. With just a few pieces of basic information, brokers get everything they need to present and bind quotes. Once a quote is chosen, the pre-filled application is completed online and brokers secure coverage straight from the Sayata platform. One insurance broker we spoke to said that Sayata helps his firm process twenty times more client requests than before. 

The benefits accrued across the whole value chain in cyber insurance alone were so great Sayata has expanded to other lines of insurance with the same mission of streamlining the process of securing insurance. While Sayata already operates in the huge cyber insurance market that has tremendous potential alone, its expansion into other lines of insurance can propel it to unicorn status.

And of course, it’s always about the people. Sayata’s team and their advisors are a syndicate of industry experts that each bring unique backgrounds to bear to carry the company forward. Three exceptional founders – Asaf Lifshitz (CEO), Avishay Maya (CTO) and Iddan Golomb (CPO) – are all graduates of the prestigious Talpiot unit in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). And unlike many of the other insurtech ventures out there, Sayata’s team also includes senior and seasoned insurance executives, including Kingsley Flynn who grew Beazley’s premiums from zero to over $1 billion in his time there.

Sayata’s frictionless scalability and its ability to move from cyber insurance into all other forms of insurance means that its growth potential is prodigious.

We are thrilled to leverage our relationships for Sayata’s growth by brainstorming how, together, we can enrich the product further, differentiate it from any competitors, and develop new business partnerships. In this way we will not only grow the company, but also make the process of mitigating the wide range of risks that SMBs face as efficient and frictionless as possible.

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