Insurtechs stopped chasing customers and started finding them

The useful part

Global insurtech funding topped $15 billion USD that year, per CB Insights, but it didn't quite go to plan. An industry built on capital reserves and state regulators, it turns out, doesn't fold because someone shipped a nicer app. Gallagher Re's latest Global InsurTech Report puts second-quarter funding at $2.44 billion USD, the most since 2022.

How it works

• Embedded insurance, meaning coverage offered inside some other purchase, works with that habit instead of fighting it.
• If you've signed a lease recently, you know the drill: sign here, then show proof of renters insurance before you get your keys.
• The embedded products that work best, he argued, feel like part of the service rather than an upsell.
• If the only honest answer is your own app, acquisition costs will quietly eat the business model, regardless of how good the product is.
• M&A has been busy, though, with incumbents buying data, workflow ownership and distribution so they can build credible AI products faster.

What to take from it

"Capital availability is clearly not a problem," Andrew Johnston, Gallagher Re's global head of insurtech, said about the numbers. You buy it because a landlord or a lender tells you to, usually with a deadline attached. BCG found that traditional insurers going this route are already seeing higher conversion rates than when they sell standalone coverage for the same products.

Example or evidence

• If you're building in a completely different space, steal the question anyway.
• Anyone can copy an interface in a couple of sprints, but a dozen enterprise integrations that clients actually trust take years to rebuild.
• Instead of spending a couple of years building vendor tools, it bought a team that had already done that work and plugged it into distribution it had spent years putting in place.
• In both cases, the buyer skipped years of building and paid for a workflow someone else had already earned.

Details worth keeping

Plenty of those startups are gone now, with the ones still standing mostly having learned something that sounds obvious in hindsight: you don't have to drag customers to your product if you can put the product where they already are. So getting a meeting with an investor is easier than it's been in years. Nobody goes shopping for insurance Nobody spends a Saturday browsing renters insurance for fun.

Related coverage

• Australianfintech: For years, technology was brought into insurance transformation to make business decisions work. Today, technology is increasingly part of making those decisions in the first place.
• Insurancejournal: Innovation" has become nearly synonymous with technology.
• Thestartupmag: U.S. property and casualty (P&C) insurers had their best underwriting year in decades in 2025, nearly tripling the industry's net