Innovation and insurtech investing with Anthemis

Anthemis Group is a NYC and UK-based multi-stage global investment firm primarily focused on fintech and insurtech. Founded in 2010, Anthemis’s most recent fund, the Anthemis Venture Fund II, raised $150M; the Group’s Asset Management unit, founded in 2016, has more than $1.2B in assets under management. Anthemis has invested in startups like Cowbell, Demex, eToro, Rize, and YuLife. 

Kate Sampson, Managing Partner at Anthemis, helps spearhead Anthemis’s growth-stage insurtech investments. A self-identified insurtech futurist, Sampson has a celebrated career in leadership positions at both traditional as well as tech-driven insurance players, helping create new insurance products for emerging risks. Perhaps most notably, Sampson helped launch Lyft’s in-house insurance operations at the time of its Series B—one of its first 100 full-time employees.

Sampson said she was attracted to Lyft’s work given the way old-school insurance practices threatened the development of new technological infrastructure, including transportation platforms like Lyft. The largest cost of an Uber or Lyft ride was insurance, she said, and existing carriers were incapable of—or refused to—turn platforms’ proprietary data into insurance pricing that matched actual risk. 

“And then I blinked my eyes, and five years later Lyft was operating a billion-dollar insurance company inside the rideshare company,” Sampson said. “Then I just thought, ‘How can I continually leave insurance better than when I found it?’ and decided to go into investing, where I'm actually funding the companies that will continue to transform the space, so that's kept me very motivated and excited to keep at it.” 

Sampson said she’s currently looking at companies that have been operating with board and investor guidance to prioritize profitability over growth, a result of tougher macroeconomic conditions. “They know the levers they can pull to extend their runway and influence their unit economics to drive revenue,” she said. “They’re fundamentally healthier businesses as a result of the focus on unit economics.” 

Emerging risks writ large offer a massive investment opportunity, Sampson continued. “Insurance is an industry that seems to always rise to the occasion,” she commented. A talent shortage in insurance, for example, is forcing tech providers—and investors—to look at ways to automate heavily manual processes. In addition, climate change is forcing insurance products to be priced with but smaller sets of historical data, making underwriting processes look at the last three years of environmental data, rather than the last 30. This will compel insurance carriers to rely more heavily on sophisticated predictive models to gauge where risks will arise moving forward, Sampson said. 

Anthemis’s investment in Demex, for example, will let insurance companies understand risks and continue to offer products in geographies that face increasing risks, rather than abandoning those places altogether. This includes non-catastrophic weather-related losses, such as precipitation increases and rising heat indexes. “Insurers are going to need solutions to understand that risk better and price that risk better,” Sampson concluded. 

The Group is anticipating and investing in products that don’t yet exist today, and, in many cases, is funding the infrastructure that can make new products possible. One of Anthemis’s first investments in this vein was in a document AI company that extracted data from unstructured documents in the financial space, which is useful for insurance operations, Sampson said. Anthemis also telescopes out and considers other applications of the solutions it invests in. For example, an aerial imaging solution may help mitigate exposure to hurricane damage, and can also be used to anticipate the areas that will face damage, helping prepare supply chains for rebuilding damaged property in particularly vulnerable geographies. “All this stuff we’re creating now actually contributes to a much more sustainable and risk-mitigated society in many ways,” Sampson said. 

Macroeconomic conditions will fundamentally influence how and where Anthemis invests in 2024. But Sampson said Anthemis is still looking for healthy investments in a range of areas. She is interested in the life and health space, and recently invested in consumer-directed benefits platform Elevate. Anthemis is also looking at insurance verification solutions. 

“There is still a ton of capital to be deployed,” Sampson said.