Wefox closes $650 million Series C

Berlin-based digital insurer Wefox has raised $650 million in a Series C funding round, at a post-money valuation of $3 billion. The company has raised over $918 million since its inception in 2014. According to the press release, wefox intends to invest the proceeds in expanding into the US and Asia within the next two years while strengthening its presence in its existing markets in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Poland.

Target Global led the round, with participation from existing investors including OMERS Ventures, Gsquared, Merian, Horizons Ventures, Eurazeo, Mubadala, Creditease, Salesforce Ventures, Speedinvest, Alma Mundi Ventures, Victory Park Capital, GR Capital, Mountain Partners, Seedcamp, and Sound Ventures. New investors include LGT, Partners Group, Jupiter, and FinTLV.

Wefox is a fully licensed digital insurance company that sells insurance through intermediaries and not directly to customers.

The news follows an announcement by Wefox that it plans to launch a risk prevention product called Wefox Prevent that will use data from smartphones and other connected devices to warn users of impending danger and a rebrand in which the three entities – Wefox, ONE and Koble – will simply be called Wefox.

A bit of additional history below –

• Wefox was/is often compared to Lemonade, especially after the acquisition of ONE, its D2C answer to Lemonade that even featured a chatbot by the name of Miri – remember the Maya-Miri battle?
• In 2018, the “biggest joint venture in insurtech history” was created between ONE and Munich Re for the purpose of launching ONE Coach, a feature for customers to monitor in real-time how their individual lifestyle choices affect their risk assessment score.
• Stephan Ommerborn, CEO of ONE, provided the following statement: “ONE has an insurance product architecture under construction, which will push experiences ahead of the entire market regarding features like adjustable short-term coverage, micro modularization of risks and real-time utilization of IoT-data. The Joint Venture enables us to put a remarkable footprint into this entirely new territory of geo-triggered insurance, also known as “UBI” (usage-based insurance). Clients will have seamless opportunities of proactive risk advisory instead of only being paid after unfortunate claim events.”
• One use case of ONE Coach was around travel insurance that can be turned on and off based on the user’s location. The product was in ‘coming soon’ mode for a long time and never seemed to come to life.
• A few months later, ONE redesigned its site and there was no mention of ONE Coach or the location-based travel insurance. In between, Wefox announced Koble, the “secret sauce” behind the success of Wefox & ONE, offering other insurers access to this tech stack via APIs.
• Wefox went all the way from being a D2C ‘disruptor’ to a B2B player enabling others to disrupt as well.

“Our business has grown significantly over the past six years, and since the beginning, we have consistently delivered strong year-on-year growth. This year we took several important steps, including unifying the business under one brand, expanding into Poland, and setting up a deep tech team in Paris. Within the next few years, we plan to expand our global footprint by increasing our presence in Europe and moving into both the US and Asian markets. This is why wefox has built a huge network of advisors across Europe. We believe that insurance is all about people, and we believe that technology is an enabler and should not replace the human connection. We have set out to improve the customer experience for both our advisors and our customers through technology to increase customer satisfaction, reduce customer acquisition costs, increase cross-selling, and decrease churn.” – Wefox CEO and founder, Julian Teicke.

“This investment strengthens our growth strategy and moves us closer to realising our vision – to prevent 30% of risks from happening – in order to offer the most advanced service to our customers. As part of this, we want to ensure that we are building the technology to automate our business processes to have a STP ratio consistently above 80%.” – Fabian Wesemann, wefox CFO and founder.

“Wefox is unique among the insurtech players with ample room for growth ahead. wefox continues to deliver exceptional results backed with demonstrable year-on-year revenue growth, which saw their insurance carrier, wefox Insurance, report a profit earlier this year, marking them out to be the first insurtech to reach profitability.” – Yaron Valler, General Partner at Target Global.