Meet Getlife, a Madrid-based startup that just raised $6.3 million (€6 million) in seed funding. The company wants to make it easier to access life insurance products in Europe. For instance, there’s no medical exams needed to subscribe to Getlife.
There are many reasons why you would want to subscribe to a life insurance product. For instance, if you’re worried about the future of your loved ones once you’re gone, life insurance could be a way to make sure they won’t face financial difficulties.
“Life insurance right now is a super difficult to buy product,” Getlife co-founder and CEO Guillermo Alén told me. Of course, it’s not as easy to insure your life as your car. Assessing the risks and underwriting can be quite difficult.
That’s why many legacy insurance companies simply refuse to insure some new clients. For one reason or another, they don’t fit the bill and the insurance company doesn’t want to cover them.
“We accept 85% of clients immediately,” Alén said. He estimates that only 55% can get a life insurance product with a traditional insurance company.
French VC firm Singular led the round. Several business angels also participated, such as Gokul Dhringa and Chris Adelsbach. The company had previously raised a €1 million pre-seed round.
When you want to become a Getlife customer, you have to answer a long list of questions so that the company can learn more about you. Once you’re done filling out the form, the startup seamlessly matches you with the right insurance product for you specifically. It’s a sort of automatic bidding process for life insurance.
“Getlife unifies all this product offering under the same brand and experience,” Alén said. “The Getlife underwriting engine creates a profile based on your answers and sells you one of the products that we have.”
Behind the scenes, Getlife has partnered directly with insurers and reinsurers, such as Axa and CNP Assurances. Getlife isn’t just a broker, it acts more like a managing general agent.
Over time, the startup hopes it can become better and better with predictive analytics. In addition to first-party data from customers, Getlife wants to connect this data with third-party data to improve its underwriting engine. For instance, the company could match different potential illnesses based on different geographies.
While anyone can go to Getlife’s website and get started, the company also wants to develop an omnichannel distribution strategy with partners, brokers, agents and affiliates. Essentially, the startup wants to become the life insurance expert across Europe.
This isn’t the only company looking at the life insurance space. In the U.S., Ethos has been doing remarkably well as it has reached a $2.7 billion valuation. YuLife is also selling life insurance products in the U.K.
In other words, now is the right time to take advantage of European regulation as European companies can provide insurance services across the European Union. Getlife is already live in Spain and the company expects to launch in France and Germany “quite soon.”
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