Digital Risks wants to triple in size and develop new products with this funding
Insurtech Digital Risks has raised £2.25m in an investment round.
The start-up had benefitted from the funding led by Concentric, with participation from Atami, Capital, Seedcamp, London Co-Investment Fund and Beazley.
Digital Risks was founded by Cameron Shearer and Ben Rose and offers insurance entirely online on a flexible monthly subscription model.
Digital Risks is targeting the digital start-up and SME market, and already insures many of the UK’s top start-ups in sectors spanning software development and IT services, media, digitised traditional businesses, plus new technology sub-sectors like fintech, medtech and edutech.
Cameron Shearer, chief executive and co-founder of Digital Risks, said: “The digital industries are growing at a phenomenal rate, as new technologies spark disruption across practically every business sector.
“Yet the commercial insurance industry has been characteristically slow to respond, leaving many tech start-ups and SMEs unable to protect themselves adequately.
“The industry needs to evolve in so many ways, from product design, to distribution and customer engagement,” he continues. “How businesses want to buy and manage their insurance has changed, with traditional offline brokers and annual commitments seen as old-fashioned and inflexible to today’s digital natives.
“There’s also a lack of understanding of emerging technologies, the risks involved and how to cover them, particularly with the rise in online threats, such as data breaches and social engineering.
“With Digital Risks, we’re making insurance work for digital businesses, with policies to cover for all the facets of what they do and structured in a way that gives them the convenience and flexibility to increase and change their cover whenever they need to.”
“New business risks”
The UK’s digital industries are growing 32% faster than any other part of the economy, representing 1.9m businesses in the UK, with anticipated growth of 5% each year.
Digital Risks has developed its own proprietary software that automates the entire process of buying and managing insurance.
The platform considers risks individually and places them with the most suitable provider.
Its products are backed by underwriters, including Aviva, Tokio Marine and Beazley.
With this funding Digital Risks will scale its marketing, triple its team and develop new online insurance products. The business also plans to move into Europe in the next 12 months.
Denis Shafranik, Partner at Concentric, said: “With new technologies proliferating exponentially across the UK and around the world, entirely new industries are being created, accompanied by entirely new business risks.
“These innovative startups and scale-ups need an insurance provider who understands what they do and the cyber and technical risks they face.
“We’ve been looking for a suitable investment in the insurance space for a number of years, but it has been a hard space to crack, with few teams showing us that they have what it takes.
“Digital Risks has that rare combination of insurance know-how, technical understanding and the ability to execute, giving us the confidence that they will become the leading digital insurance brand in the years to come.”
No comments yet