Digital Risks, a digital-insurer for UK tech startups, has raised £2.25m.
The cash injection will help the company scale its marketing, triple its team and develop new online insurance products.
Over the next year, the firm also plans to expand in Europe before launching further afield.
European early-stage tech startup investor Concentric led the pre-Series A round, whilst Atami Capital, Seedcamp, London Co-Investment Fund and Beazley all contributed.
The London-based startup was founded by Cameron Shearer and Ben Rose. It aims to make insurance for entrepreneurs and digital SMEs, a product which is entirely online and based on a flexible monthly subscription model.
CEO Shearer was inspired to kick start Digital Risks while personally struggling with commercial insurance in the tech and advertising sectors, seeing it as inflexible, expensive and lacking in technical knowledge.
Shearer explained how Digital Risks is catering for the cyber age: “The commercial insurance industry has been characteristically slow to respond, leaving many tech startups and SMEs unable to protect themselves adequately.
“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,” he added.
The company has built software which automates the process of buying and managing insurance. The platform considers risks individually and matches that with a suitable model and provider.
Denis Shafranik, partner at Concentric, commented: “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.”
Tom Wilson, investment partner at Seedcamp, which has previously invested in start-ups including Revolut and Transferwise, concluded: “We believe the insurance market is ripe for further disruption and see a massive opportunity for Digital Risks’ suite of products serving fast-growth, dynamic businesses – a sector we know very well across our own portfolio.”