Last week CoverWallet, one of our portfolio companies, was acquired by Aon, one of the world’s leading companies focused on insurance. CoverWallet was launched in early 2016 by its co-founders Inaki and Rashmi to reinvent commercial insurance by leveraging technology, the speed of the internet, great product design, customer service and data science. At the start, CW was operating as an insurance broker providing paperless, real-time quotes. Today it has reinvented and digitized pretty much every step of the end-to-end experience for its customers.
We want to congratulate Inaki, Rashmi, Jim and all of the other members of the CoverWallet team for building such a great company in a short period of time.
We invested in a follow-on to CoverWallet’s seed round in March 2016. We didn’t even make it to the 4th anniversary. Aon essentially pre-empted the Series C by expressing interest in acquiring the company in Q2 last year, subject to working together on a six-month partnership project. As much as CW’s existing investors wanted to continue investing and benefit from the team’s vision and exceptional execution, Aon’s terms and post-closing plans for CW won the day.
M+A doesn’t always work out. Many acquired companies languish or worse post-acquisition. I don’t believe that will happen here. Aon bought CW to lead its global innovation activities. They spent six months looking under the hood and liked what they found. Aon understands that strong technology and product DNA will help them develop, distribute, manage and support all kinds of insurance and risk products and provide a lot of value to their customers. Inaki wrote a post about this last week.
When we invested, CW’s product was barebones and had only just launched. There were 8 employees, with 4-6 offers out. It was operating out of an incubation space at Two Sigma Ventures, one of its seed investors. Major carriers did not offer real-time quotes. Today, CoverWallet has more than 300 employees, primarily in New York City, Rochester and Madrid. It operates in most states in the US, as well as in Spain and Switzerland (in partnership with ZurichRe) and Australia (in partnership with Aon). It has tens of thousands of web-based customers and one of the highest NPS scores in the industry.
We’re excited to watch the CoverWallet/Aon partnership develop over the coming years, we’re only sorry not to be an ongoing investor. Personally, I will miss hopping on a subway to visit this great team on a regular basis. It’s been a privilege to work with them over the last four years.