We’re incredibly excited by IBISA as they represent both an impact play with huge commercial viability. It’s rare to meet a business that’s clearly delivering on impact alongside having the lightness and ability to scale like a true commercial SaaS business. We hope the success of IBISA, paves the way for the next generation of insurtech and climate founders to innovate and accelerate this fast-moving segment. See below why we decided to partner with IBISA by leading their €1.5m seed round…
A huge protection gap
There are over 500 million smallholder farmers that produce 70% of global food supply, yet 98% of them do not have access to insurance. The main blockers to selling agricultural insurance in remote locations have been historically high costs of claims handling, fragmented distribution, inadequate products and gaps in the value chain.
IBISA provides this missing link and enables local mutual insurers, takaful insurers, commercial insurers, cooperatives and global companies to distribute transparent and objective protection, from farmers’ biggest risk, unpredictable weather. They provide a fully digital end to end platform that includes index design, policy management platform and automated remote loss assessment based on Earth Observation satellite data.
Domain experts
The founding team of Maria, Jean-Baptiste and Annettee demonstrate a highly unique, complementary and strongly entrepreneurial background. Each has a different domain expertise, which aligns well with the core elements of IBISA’s business model. Insurance, satellite data analytics and decentralised platforms.
Platform approach
IBISA offers a low cost, efficient and scalable platform to its partners and insurers that connects the entire value chain of agriculture – from the individual farmer and mutual to the reinsurance provider and global food corporations. The product is highly retentive as it gains defensibility from an ecosystem approach and also provides a unique entry point for new market participants whilst enabling IBISA to scale across each of their respective regulatory environments.
The platform is composed of 3 parts: 1) IBISA Earth Engine, 2) Loss Assessment System, and 3) Policy Management System. It is an end-to-end digital platform for insurance actors and is crop agnostic.
Novel product
IBISA’s ‘hybrid parametric’ product is a fresh approach to tackling basis risk (the difference between satellite data and the actual truth on the ground) within agriculture insurance. It enables a fairer and more transparent ‘claims’ process through a group of decentralised human ‘watchers’ who evaluate estimated loss and pay-out where the automated AI engine can’t guarantee a significant degree of confidence. This unique method of evaluating weather events in remote geographies enables IBISA to build out a strong underwriting advantage on better determining ground truth through satellite data analytics.
Summary
With their team backgrounds, product vision and execution ability, IBISA is ready to scale in global markets and solve genuine societal pain points with a truly unique platform approach. We are incredibly excited to support them on the journey ahead!
Get in touch
If you have founded a pre-seed or seed climate insurtech and are looking for support and funding – or maybe you just have an idea that you would like to chat through – we have the experience and the tools to help you get to market faster. Check out our incubator and venture fund or get in touch.