Eos Venture Partners, a venture capital investor focused on insurance technology, is looking to raise a $100m debut fund.
The firm claims EVP I will be of the first global, independent InsurTech investment funds targeting early and growth stage investments.
Eos has already $30m for the fund having announced a Limited Partner (LP) commitment of $20m from a global insurer, with whom it has entered into a strategic partnership to accelerate their innovation strategy. EVP I has also raised its second $10m commitment from a European insurer.
Formed in 2016, the VC has made eight InsurTech investments to date, with six going on to successfully raise up-rounds. Notable investments include Neos, a connected home insurance proposition, which raised $7m from Aviva and Munich Re, and Digital Fineprint, a business that uses social media to enhance the insurance process, which raised $2.7m from PenTech Ventures.
Its portfolio also includes marine and auto insurance platform Concirrus, MENA-focused Democrance, bike insurance business Laka, tokenisation security provider AssetVault, SaaS platform RightIndem, and Gen.Life, which applies machine learning to the life and health insurance sectors.
General partner Sam Evans said, “InsurTech is one of the fastest growing investment sectors globally and is a compelling space in which to invest. There are tremendous opportunities to drive innovation and Eos is positioned at the heart of this new and exciting sector. The global insurance industry is facing an unprecedented period of change, that will see a trillion-dollar value shift between winners and losers.”
Evans, along with Jonathan Kalman and Carl-Georg Bauer-Schlichtegroll, will lead the fund. Bauer-Schlichtegroll l was previously head of the financial institutions group at JP Morgan and Credit Suisse, Evans was previously head of the insurance deal advisory practice at KPMG and Kalman is an experienced VC investor with multiple successful exits. EOS currently has offices in London and Philadelphia, and this year will launch an InsurTech innovation centre in India.
Global InsurTech funding gained traction in 2017 with $2bn capital invested according to data by FinTech Global. Q2 2017 was the second strongest funding quarter for global InsurTech companies to date, with $940.3m invested across 55 deals.
The final quarter of last year saw a total of $595.9m invested which makes it the fourth strongest funding quarter to date. Last year also saw a clear shift towards larger deals. Sub-$1m deals dropped in share from 36.4% in 2016 to 21.6% according to the data. This fall was mainly offset by deals valued between $5m to $10m which more than tripled in share from 5.3% to 16.3% over the same period.
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