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