Like Knip, FinanceFox is another startup founded in Switzerland that is moving the insurance brokerage process online. Its mobile app lets you manage of all your existing insurance and get advice regarding gaps in your coverage or ways to save money on your insurance requirements going forward.
To help with that mission, the startup — which is based in Berlin, Zurich and Barcelona — has raised a $5.5 million round of funding led by Salesforce Ventures, with participation from AngelList, Idinvest, Seedcamp and Speedinvest. The new capital will be used to expand its marketing and sales activities in Switzerland and Germany as well as enter new markets.
That Salesforce Ventures is a backer should perhaps come as no surprise. I’m told that the FinanceFox app is built entirely on the Salesforce platform, while the startup describes its model as employing a hybrid approach by combining the advantages of a traditional insurance broker — a main point of contact and personalised support — with digitizing the insurance broker process. This includes storing all of your insurance policies in the app, through which you can also file and manage insurance claims.
“FinanceFox eliminates all pain-points,” says co-founder and CEO Julian Teicke. Not only is all your insurance paperwork digitized, offering the ability to compare competing products, but the app is also the interface to a “personal consultant that compares your life situation and your current coverage and sends you offers to digitally sign right on the app”.
The bigger vision, says Teicke, is for FinanceFox to become the “single point of contact for everything insurance related in your life, available 24/7”.
The service is also free of charge for the customer, while the startup makes money via a “service component” paid by insurance companies in return for FinanceFox handling most of the admin and support side of insurance. That’s a business model that has been around for as long as insurance brokerage has existed. The startup is simply but smartly updating it for a mobile-first age.
Comment