Corporate Venturing Report: Deep Dive Into Financial Services and InsurTech: InsurTech

Our previous report captured the global, external venturing landscape. In the following 2 years, more investments in startups were made than ever before despite a global pandemic.

The 2021 edition of our Corporate Venturing Report is focused on the venturing units that make these investments. In particular, we thought that it would be timely to examine venturing units in the financial services sector affiliated with
insurance firms. Insurance is one of the most recent domains to embark on digital transformation and to embrace corporate venturing as a means to pursuing corporate renewal.

In the first section of the report, we present some macro industry-level figures on the insurance sector. These are based on Crunchbase data that cover 25 years between 1996-2020, and provide a snapshot of the competitive landscape encountered when scouting InsuranceTech startups.

In the second section of the report, we partnered with InsurTechNY to reach out to active, insurance corporate venturing units around the globe. 29 venturing units responded to our call, which we estimate represents up to 39 percent of the corporate firms engaged in external venturing in the insurance domain. We introduce the concepts of scouting and selection intensities, in which comparative performance is illustrated based on the relative performance of the cohort group of survey participants.

The report constitutes research work in progress and therefore should be taken with a grain of salt — we encourage practitioners to use these analyses as food for thought to reflect on their units’ practices.