As a foreigner, navigating health insurance systems can often be difficult. German startup feather She believes she has a solution and has raised €6 million to help more than 40 million expats working and living in Europe.
That’s not to say there aren’t options for foreign nationals to get insurance; there are plenty. But precisely because the offering is fragmented and difficult to tailor to individual needs, Feather believes it can carve out a space for itself despite stiff competition from established companies.
With expatriates often having access to their host country’s public health system, a big part of the question is where they are located, especially during the transitional periods that have become increasingly common with the advent of remote working.
That’s the level of detail the startup wants to get right, Feather CEO Rob Schumacher told TechCrunch. For example, it offers a recommendation tool to help people understand what kind of coverage they might need, starting with health insurance but also including additional options like life, pet, auto and personal liability insurance.
“The funny thing is that anyone who is an expat immediately recognizes this,” Schumacher said. That has helped Feather secure angel checks from former founders who gained knowledge of the issue through their own startups, such as GoCardless, Monzo and N26, where Feather’s CTO Vincent Odoare was one of its first employees.
Wise co-founder Taavet Hinrikus also invested in Feather through the venture capital fund he co-founded, called Plural. Feather’s lead investor, Keen Venture Partners, even came on board: It was his colleague Abdul Afridi, an expat himself, who approached the startup, not the other way around, Schumacher said.
However, fundraising has never been easy for insurtech startups in the post-2021 buzz, and Schumacher is concerned about making the process seem easier than it was.
With the collapse of French insurtech startup Luko in the background, and other general insurtech issues, getting through due diligence wasn’t easy. As talks continued, Feather’s founders simply considered returning to the pursuit of profitability. “And I think that’s the main thing that made us interesting again,” Schumacher said.
International expansion
Feather has succeeded in achieving this goal because its new backers provide it with extensive expertise in a wide range of topics, including branding, but primarily because the capital will help fuel its internal expansion. The startup currently serves expatriates in Germany, France and Spain, and is scheduled to launch in three more countries by the end of 2024.
Schumacher said she could not have done it without additional funding. “We would have done a lot more extra stuff.” Perhaps it was a missed opportunity: the startup says it made more in the six months following its launch in Spain than it did in its first 18 months in Germany.
Despite the international audience it serves, the expansion roadmap was not clear for Feather, whose founders thought they might target a broader audience in Germany first. However, they soon realized that the expatriate field was particularly interesting for a digital-first offering like theirs.
Compared to the same age group of locals, expatriates are more likely not to do business with a broker. But they still need help; As a French citizen, Oudouard knows this firsthand, as does Schumacher, who moved to Germany after spending most of his life abroad.
While they scratch their own itch, the duo realizes that the market they are targeting is Very largeWhether you call them expatriates or immigrants, the truth is that Europe’s economies seem intent on hiring more foreign workers to compensate for their aging populations.
Find balance
Feather promises its end users a better experience consisting of transparent policies, unbiased recommendations, and a simple digital claims process, all in English. With its new funding, it is also betting on employee benefits insurance, which companies that employ a lot of expatriates may want to provide.
While it is as bullish on the technology as any insurtech player, Feather is also careful not to offend the legacy players it partners with, and has two senior insurance executives at its cap table.
This, combined with his thoughtful approach to fundraising and spending, could pay off, or at least help companies avoid the scrutiny that new insurtech partnerships face. “For the past six years we have been doing healthy, sustainable work, and this allows you to unleash new things, even with incumbents,” Schumacher said.