Facebook-Backed Company Eyes Insurance
Let’s talk about Life360 ; a mobile app available on iPhone and Android that’s known for its ‘family locator’ feature. It allows a group of people to instantly see where everyone is, and message the group at once or privately. The San Francisco-based company was founded in 2008 and has since raised $76.1M from several investors including: Bessemer Venture Partners, Bullpen Capital, Facebook’s fbFund (Facebook’s business incubator and mini financier that’s no longer active), Fontinalis Partners, and 500 Startups.
“Life360 is the largest family network in the world. Our 150 million users make up approximately 50 million families, with a million new families added just last month. Our APIs process over 800 million location points a day, so we have plenty of traffic to play with. Now is the perfect time for you to join the Life360 team. Not only is our user base growing at a healthy rate, our upcoming product releases are some of the most exciting in the company’s history and you will be an important part of the team” – that’s a bit of verbiage taken from Life360’s recent job posting for Lead Data Scientist.
And so, Coverager decided to uncover the definition of ‘exciting’. Here goes.
Yesterday Robin Fan uploaded the following video to his YouTube Channel:
In this video, titled “consumer insurance acquisition demo”, one can see the Life360 mobile app send an alert to a user to indicate that the app detected an ‘insurance deal’ from Progressive that will allow for savings of ‘up to 30% in 5 minutes”. User can then choose to proceed by scanning his/her driver license. Later, the app pulls driver info, vehicle data and retrieves prior insurance coverage to offer a car insurance quote from Progressive. Look.
The user can edit coverage and proceed to payment. Hold that thought.
Turns out, Robin Fan is a product designer at smartphone-based telematics solutions provider Zendrive, which shares several investors in common with Life360 (Think: Expansion Venture Capital, BMW i Ventures, and Fontinalis Partners). The two also maintain a “deep partnership and collaboration”: “Thanks to the scale, technical superiority and mobile-developer first foundation of our platform, family app Life360 chose to partner exclusively with Zendrive to offer driver-safety features such as Crash Detection and Safe Driving Reviews. Our deep partnership and collaboration with Life360 resulted in a best-in-industry battery consumption, which is critical for consumers. With Life360 Driver Protect, Zendrive’s technology is democratizing access to driver safety features via an app with over 50 million registered users, and is helping provide peace of mind to families on the road.”
Wait, there’s more. Robin Fan also uploaded this video that shows how a Lyft driver can submit an insurance claim via an app:
In sum, something’s brewing.
PS. Lyft offers drivers insurance coverage from ‘app on’ to ‘driver dropped’ with the help of Marsh Risk and Insurance Services.
