The insurtech firm broke into the market by targeting small and medium enterprises.
Insgeek (保险极客) has announced the completion of a USD 25 million Series C round of financing (on March 18), led by China Renaissance (华兴资本) and SIG Asia Investments (海纳亚洲创投基金). According to the former institution, this marks the highest funding amount recorded in the insurtech field in recent years.
Previously, the company closed another four rounds of financing, landing approximately CNY 185 million (USD 25 million) in total. National Small Medium Enterprises Development Fund (国家中小企业发展基金) and Legend Holdings (联想控股, 3396:HKEX) are among its existing investors.
Founded in 2014, the Beijing-based Insgeek cut into China’s group insurance market by leveraging emerging technologies like cloud computing and big data.
Different to many counterparts like Huize.com (慧择保险, HUIZ:NASDAQ) and Xiaoyusan Insurance (小雨伞保险) who operate under a Customer to Customer (C2C) model, Insgeek positions itself as a Business-to-Business (B2B) player.
The business of the firm started building up a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform that provides full-line health insurance and corresponding settlement and reimbursement services to employees of clients that took part in insurance plans through Insgeek. The insured employees can be reimbursed quickly by uploading digital copies of documents through WeChat; normally, the claim can be settled within five working days.
Besides, the insurtech firm also expanded its scope to cover employee benefits service area in a boarder sense, and now, towards building up a health management platform.
There is still plenty of room in China’s group insurance market. One of the major pain points is that it shares many similarities with bank loans, with incumbent players mainly concentrating on providing services to large corporations and seldom caring about Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs).
In this case, as SMEs typically lack bargaining power, they tend to need to pay a higher price and receive poor claims settlement services in purchasing group insurance plans for their employees from large insurance organizations. Therefore, this provides opportunities for insurtech initiators like Insgeek to cut into the market.
Up to now, Insgeek has served hundreds of thousands of employees from more than 6,000 enterprises – a majority of which are growth-stage. Meanwhile, they also started to receive orders from large-scale corporations. At present, their biggest client has more than 10,000 employees, while this figure was 4,000 in 2018.