By Inaki Berenguer, Co-Founder and CEO of CoverWallet
It’s a fact: startups need to have insurance.
They need to protect their property, their employees, their products and services, their founders and executives, and several other parts of their business. And even if founders don’t want to spend money on insurance, it is necessary to buy it to satisfy the minimum requirements of a contract or of the investors. Until now, the process for startups to get insurance has been complex, time-consuming, and frustrating. And all of us at CoverWallet believe it should be simple, fast, and convenient.
Today I’m excited to announce a new initiative from CoverWallet called CoverStartups, which provides high-growth companies with a dedicated platform and resources to help them get the insurance coverage they need in a matter of minutes.
Since CoverWallet’s launch in 2016, tens of thousands of small businesses have benefited from the CoverWallet platform. CoverStartups builds on our current offering and is designed specifically for startups, providing tailored insurance offerings to companies from Seed to Series B and beyond. As the startup grows, we make it simple for businesses to update their policies and add additional coverage. VC companies often require Directors & Officers (D&O) insurance for the companies they invest in; buildings and co-working spaces require General Liability for businesses to sign leases; and when businesses hire their first employees, most states make it mandatory to have Workers Compensation. CoverStartups businesses will be able to get quotes, purchase policies, and manage their insurance directly through the platform while having access to support from insurance advisors specializing in startups if they have questions.
Any startup founder who has had to purchase insurance for their business will tell you how painful the process is. When I founded my first company, Pixable, many years ago, I went online to try to buy insurance thinking it would be like buying any other product. But there was no way to get it digitally, I had to fill out dozens of pages of paperwork, and it took weeks to get coverage. On a similar note, when Pixable got acquired by SingTel in 2012, I needed to buy a D&O policy as one of the requisites to complete the transaction during due diligence. The whole acquisition was delayed three weeks because it took that long to get the D&O policy in place. And I could not understand or explain why the process was so analog, time-consuming, and opaque. It was this frustrating experience that led to the idea for CoverWallet.
We have been on a mission since 2015 to make business insurance simple and convenient. As a startup ourselves, we understand what other startups look for in the purchasing process, and we have reinvented insurance to make it fast and easy for high-growth companies to navigate and handle online.
For more information about CoverStartups, please visit www.coverstartups.com.