Simfuni: Revolutionizing Insurance Payments
Kia Ora friends!
New Zealand startup ecosystem remained fairly active in March despite the SVB crisis in the US and a record 11th rate hike by the Reserve Bank of New Zealand taking the OCR rate to 5.25%. We see the interest rate cycle peaking at these levels (Australia kept rates steady at 3.6%) and some of the high growth technology stocks rallying in anticipation of that.
We saw incoming deal flow in various segments and are actively engaged with startups in:
Mussel farm management
Customer engagement for brand awareness
Calendar app for families
Agtech for pasture management
Medtech for prostate surgeries
Our partner Glen attended an event in San Francisco hosted by NZTE and the Bridgewest Group focused on early-stage technology and life sciences investing in NZ. It is great to be a part of the effort to bridge NZ companies over to Silicon Valley.
Startup of the month: Simfuni
Simfuni is a digital payments and software platform that modernizes the selling of insurance from its antiquated manual processes. Insurance market in NZ/AUS is handled by brokers and agents and the payments are currently processed manually or through disparate systems. That's where the opportunity lies. It starts by providing the customer a payment tool for premiums, effectively turning that into self-service where the broker is not involved. Simfuni integrates with workflow software that creates insurance invoices and also allows a premium-funding option for customers who don’t want to pay the premium upfront. They also take care of the SOC2 compliance requirements for the broker, creating an all-in-one infrastructure and scalable payments CX as a service. They can charge transaction fee and other fees for providing this stack and handling compliance requirements. Brokers alone represent $14-15B in payments processed in AUS/NZ which is a significant revenue opportunity.
We were impressed by founders Shaun Quincey and Damon O’Neill’s vision to bring a modern technology stack to a relatively old-fashioned industry. They are second-time founders who successfully exited their Buy Now Pay Later startup GenoaPay / LatitudePay in 2020. NZVC is excited to partner with them in their mission to simplify insurance payments.
Best regards,
Mark Pavlyukovskyy, Ajay Gupta, and Glen Anderson