What is the Future State: Insurance?

The Future State is a newsletter dedicated to understanding the future of markets through the lens of startups and their investors. We’re seeking to understand why entrepreneurs are investing their time and why VCs are investing their money into solving hard problems.

Currently, this newsletter is focused on insurance (and related financial services). In the future, we plan to release more newsletters along other verticals such as fintech, CPG, food and beverage, connected health, as well as, the future of work.

Every two weeks, we’ll release a profile of a high-quality startup that has recently raised venture funding.

For each profile, we interview the founders or senior executives, as well as, core investors backing the company. We seek to understand the problem the startup is solving, its total addressable market, how the startup better solves the problem than incumbents and competitors, and what (if any) challenges exist potentially preventing its path to becoming a billion-dollar business.

Why in the world are you starting with insurance?

Insurance is the invisible foundation underpinning our global economy and our day-to-day lives. Our modern economy wouldn’t be here if not for insurance. Overseas trade would never have existed without the advent of cargo insurance 2,000+ years ago.

Beyond its foundational importance, insurance touches everything. You can approach almost everything through the lens of insurance and risk. Take the car for example. Beyond the core product of car insurance, we have telematics technology emerging that can better predict car failure, and, of course, the impending arrival of autonomous vehicles that will turn car insurance on its head.

In the insurance space, there are numerous exciting topics we plan to touch on from newly-imagined catastrophe insurance, embedded insurance, the promise of automation to improve loss and expense ratios, as well as, the promise of newly captured data to improve underwriting.

We think insurance is cool and we hope to convince you of just that.

How do we choose who to profile?

We choose these startups using our Investor Quality Score. The Investor Quality Score ranks a startup’s cap table. We assess these investors based on their prior success leading (or not leading) rounds, the magnitude of their exits, and how early they invested. VCs don’t invest on a whim. They back top-notch teams, innovative products, and lucrative markets. In private markets, where companies are not required to release any information, an investor’s presence on a cap table may be the best starting point for comparing startups and figuring out where to focus.

About Radicle

Radicle is a research and insight company that helps the world’s leading companies make faster and more confident investments in the future: launching new products and services, making organizational build / buy decisions about what markets to enter (and how), and finding the right startup partner.

The core insight that underpins our approach – and is woven through our products – is to identify and uncover the latent expertise, domain experience, and insights of leaders on the forefront of new markets. These insights are delivered through a set of products that increase the velocity and odds of critical future-facing investments.

How do I reach you?

My email is harry@radicleinsights.com 😊