Five graduate startups of the Lloyd’s Lab insurtech incubator made their pitches to DWIC 2024, grilled by questions from a panel that included Vicky Carter, deputy chair of Lloyd’s.
Lloyd’s Lab hosted a ‘Dragons’ Den’ insurtech innovation session at DWIC 2024, held today in Dubai.
The five firms pitching are all graduates of the Lloyd’s Lab incubator of Insurtech innovation, with Rosie Denée, senior manager of the Lloyd’s Lab hosting proceedings.
Like the popular television show, the pitch presenters were grilled with questions by three senior executives (pictured) – the ‘Dragons’:
- Vicky Carter, deputy chair of Lloyd’s, and chairman of global capital solutions, international, Guy Carpenter
- Stephen Gotz, head of business, Dubai International Financial Centre Innovation Hub
- Mohamed Sharaf, chief operating officer of Investment Attraction at Dubai Economic Development Corporation.
The competition – decided by an audience vote – was won by Phinsys, which was part of the third cohort of Lloyd’s Lab in September 2019.
The startup has built a platform of intelligent finance automation tools to deliver systematic controls to optimise financial close and reporting processes.
“They are graduates that have gone through our ten-week programme. They’ve come through different cohorts, but they each have designs in expanding in this region,” said Rosie Denée, senior manager of the Lloyd’s Lab, hosting proceedings.
“This is part of our ongoing commitment to the companies who have graduated: we will help you with your regional growth,” Denée said.
“The fantastic thing about our programme is that you never leave the Lab if you don’t want to. We will continue to accelerate and help companies scale at pace alongside the market,” she continued.
Each of the pitching firms has expansion ambitions in the UAE and wider Middle East region.
“This is a great way to help them promote themselves, but also a great way to showcase to the DWIC 2024 audience what the Lab is capable of,” Denée added.
Below is a summary of each of the five competing startups.
Phinsys
The winning pitch from Phinsys was delivered by Stuart Conibear, the company’s commercial director (pictured below with Rosie Denée of Lloyd’s Lab).
Phinsys has built a platform of software tools that aims to optimise and automate the finance function of insurance businesses.
This is geared towards improving their financial accounting, regulatory reporting and analytical processes.
The company said it works with a wide range of insurance organisations across the UK, Europe, US, Bermuda, and Lloyd’s insurance markets.
Cyntegra
The first pitch of the morning was presented by Maria Vachino co-founder of Cyntegra.
Cyntegra’s patented recovery operating system aims to help organisations avoid the potentially catastrophic disruption and associated costs of ransomware and disruptive malware attacks.
The company says it can do this by enabling its end users to fully restore a compromised system to its familiar and functional preattack state in minutes.
Aquinsure
Eric Li, chief executive of Aquinsure was the second pitcher.
Aquinsure is an aquacultural technology company with a vision of improving aquacultural efficiency and sustainability.
Its team is a joint group of acoustic researchers, aquacultural experts and insurance actuaries, using sonar to provide parametric insurance policies.
Loro
Peter Tilbrook, CEO of Loro pitched his company’s vision to the dragons.
Loro’s platform enables insurers or MGAs to quickly create, customize, and deploy specialty insurance products without any upfront investment, Tilbrook explained.
Loro’s solution is offered free for the first $100,000 of gross written premium each year, which the company says “provides unmatched accessibility and affordability”.
Supercede
Tom Spier, head of commercial at Supercede provided the final pitch of the session.
The company, founded by an ex broker and a former underwriter has built an e-trading and ecosystem platform built to support the facilitation of any reinsurance deal.
Supercede works across the reinsurance value chain, offering services to cedents, brokers and reinsurers, the company said.
It provides cedents with data preparation, connects brokers with a global network of reinsurance underwriters, and offers reinsurers the ability to search for risks that map their appetite.
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