How can we force talented engineers to work for startups in common areas when more exciting companies are actively paying and hiring? Here’s the answer from one insurance startup from Poland called Ominimo: It makes wages competitive, but more importantly, it gives those engineers a license to apply talent and reinvent the workings of the field.
Starting with a budget that was bootstrapped just 12 months ago, Ominimo believes that it has found another better approach to understanding and pricing risk. The company says that 300,000 policies have been registered in Hungary’s first market, and is already growing profitably. Currently, I am receiving the first external investment from my strategic supporter, Zurich Insurance Group, to promote the next stage of my life.
TechCrunch understands from sources that Zurich has invested 10 million euros (approximately $11 million) in 5% of the company, valueating Ominimo at 200 million euros ($220 million). Neither Ominimo nor Zurich commented on the investment amount, but both confirmed the ratings.
Ominimo raised money when former incumbent Wefox, one of Europe’s most well-known and well-known insurance startups, sold a portion of the business and earned lifeline funds and floated.
Wefox is not only a story of attention on how to grow your insurance business, but also a clear opportunity. Perhaps the reason why Wefox grew so quickly is because of market demand (from both consumers and investors). The startups simply rippled their waves without sweeping them.
Ominimo is already profitable, but it’s definitely a modest effort. Today, the startup is only active in one Hungary market and focuses solely on car insurance, one type of insurance for consumers. The plan is to replicate the model in more regions and categories.
The company plans to expand to more than 10 new markets, starting in Poland, Sweden and the Netherlands. Zurich Insurance acts as a risk carrier, while Ominimo operates as a Zurich broker, especially a general agent for managing. Startups will initially focus on car insurance, but will add property insurance over time.
Dusan Comer, CEO of Ominimo, who co-founded the company with Dennis Winevender (now Chief Price and Data Officer) and Laslo Holbas (CTO), saw the challenges the insurance industry faced directly while working at McKinsey. He said major insurance companies are stuck due to three main issues. A difficult, rigorous legacy system that challenges you to use to quickly launch new services and tackle new innovations such as AI-based pricing. It slows down the decision-making process at the company level. and talent.
“Glorious software engineers and data scientists don’t dream of working for insurance companies,” he said.
Others, like McKinsey, are usually called to try and fix all three at once. Komar and his team built a new product from scratch and “handed over the code” to their insurance clients. “It worked to some extent, but not as complete as we wanted,” he said.
Taking clues from the world of fintech and other insurance startups, Kommer and his two co-founders saw the opportunity to develop the product as their own company rather than as their clients. They use the API to plug in features and features from other providers that may not build themselves, and that’s how Ominimo was born.
Ominimo essentially applies AI-based inference based on Big-Data analysis. When it comes to building and pricing insurance estimates, traditional insurers may use five or six key parameters to determine the price: age, economic bracket, vehicle type, past driving history, or vehicle location. New insurance companies may add 10 or 15 additional parameters to it.
“But there are some variables that aren’t really very important, and aren’t that clear,” Comer said. For example, once you get the license plate for a vehicle, you can use the database, he said. This gives you 100 different variables about the vehicle, such as vehicle length, height, width, weight, etc. “It’s interesting to see, for example, that the data shows a very strong correlation between the length of the car and the frequency of accidents while parked,” he said.
Ominimo performs calculations taking into account all of these details, including population density and more.
Of course, there are already many insurance startups in the market that promote AI use across the platform to improve backend decision-making and frontend customer experience. Fintech claims that it has dozens of startups, just as it is built on AI.
Comer’s response to this is that Ominimo’s track record speaks for itself. “I think what really matters is actually the performance in the market, so if you compare the performance to the performance of lemonade, [a key competitor]He argued that Ominimo’s “loss rate” is below the market average, which he said is gaining a 7% market share in Hungary, the only country.
Like many neobanks in the market, Fintech and insurance really have a lot in common, but many “new” insurance players are creating a more modern user experience, reducing confusion under the hood.
“There’s a difference between claiming to do data science from a risk assessment perspective and actually doing it,” he said. Many of his startup competitors have “really focused on great customer experiences, very great front-ends, very lean and intuitive journeys, but there wasn’t much under the hood.”
He argued that giving talent a place to do the work they want to do was how Ominimo attracted and maintained key people. “We have eight medalists from the Olympics in Mathematics and Physics. [prestigious competitions in these fields] Within our data science team, these are very incredible young minds and for the first time now we are able to unfold their potential on a global scale. And this really shows in the KPIs we see. ”
It also attracted Zurich insurance and is looking for more diverse ways to bring about a new wave of customers.
“Expanding retail to profits is Zurich’s important ambition for the 2025-2027 cycle. As such, we are delighted with our distribution partnership with Direct, which will allow us to offer innovative auto insurance solutions and expand our retail customer base in Europe. “We are delighted to be strengthening our relationship with Ominimo’s minority shareholders.”
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