With our accelerator program more than halfway done, understanding the startups in the cohort would not be possible without knowing the story of how the cohort came to be…

New York has always been a FinTech dominated city. It was a natural home for FinTech with the vast majority of banks headquartered in the City. However, there has always been healthy competition with San Francisco for the best talent, funding, and startup HQs.

Flashback to 2015, InsurTech was in its infancy; Lemonade (NYC), Policy Genius (NYC), Zenefits (SF), and Hippo (SF) just started. Meanwhile, the support ecosystem – VCs, corporate innovation teams, event organizers, and accelerators were nascent. At first, the Bay Area earned the title as the InsurTech hub when SVIA held its first dedicated InsurTech conference, Zenefits raised $500 million to become a Unicorn, and ITC chose its home in Las Vegas.

The intervening years were marked by a back-and-forth swapping between SF and NYC for the title of top InsurTech city. In 2019, Carrier Management named NYC the InsurTech capital and we started InsurTech NY.

Our vision was to create a sandbox in the NYC metro area where InsurTechs could play and gain an unfair advantage. We also saw a need for growth-stage startups between late seed-stage and Series B to cross the chasm to profitability and develop additional carrier/broker partnerships.

To support those startups, we partnered with 18 insurance carriers and brokers to launch our accelerator and selected 22 startups:

Life and Annuities Lines: Amenity Analytics, Best Fit, Breathe Life, Everyday Life, Fenris, Gerald App, Insurmi, IXN, Sensely, Sorcero, and Vymo

NEW YORK, Oct. 13, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — InsurTech NY, the largest InsurTech community in the New York metro area, announced today its growth-stage InsurTech accelerator cohort.

22 startups were selected to participate in its insurance carrier and broker sponsored program that focuses on providing resources to support traction, talent, and financing. The program will provide access to insurance carriers and brokers looking to deploy new technologies and provide financial backing to digital managing general agencies (MGAs).

“Our member carriers and brokers worked closely with us to hand-select startups that align with their organizational goals,” said David Gritz, InsurTech NY Managing Director. “The goal of the program is to help startups accelerate the process of building long-term strategic relationships and gain knowledge on the best way to do so.”

Selected startups include:

Life and Annuities Lines: Amenity Analytics, Best Fit, Breathe Life, Everyday Life, Fenris, Gerald App, Insurmi, IXN, Sensely, Sorcero, and Vymo

Property and Casualty Lines: Assurely, Dealer Policy, Ecopia, GradientAI, Guardhog, Harbor.ai, Honcho, Neural Metrics, Pinpoint Predictive, Relay, and TrustLayer

For traction, 18 member corporations will work closely with the startups to establish proof of concepts and partnerships. For talent acquisition, startups will be invited to present at the InsurTech Matchmaking Expo on Oct 29. For fundraising, startups will work with 17 insurance-focused corporate VCs, traditional VCs, and angel investors. The program will run for a total of six weeks, ending on November 12.