How do you get talented engineers work for a start in a permanent field at a time when the most exciting companies are paying well and hiring aggressively? Here is a response from a start of insurance from Poland called ominimo: make competitive pay, but most importantly, give them the license to apply their talent and recreate the way the field works.
Launched with a bootstrapped budget just 12 months ago, Omnimo believes that another and better approach to understanding and the risk of prices has been found. The company says it is already profitable and rapidly growing, with 300,000 policies registered in its first Hungarian market. Now, to promote her next phase of life, she is getting her first investment out of a strategic supporter, Zurich Insurance Group.
Techcrunch understands from the sources Zurich is making a € 10m (about $ 11 million) capital investment by 5% of the company, estimating Ominimo with € 200m ($ 220 million). Neither Omarino nor Zurich commented on the invested amount, but both did not confirm the assessment.
Omnimo has raised funds at a time when one of the most popular and capitalized beginnings of Europe-WEFOX once unclear-but sells parts of his business and is receiving lifeline funding to stay at sea.
Wefox serves as a warning tale on how to grow an insurance business, but also a clear opportunity. Apparently the reason Wefox grew so quickly was due to demand in the market (both consumers and investors) – a startup had to only browse that wave without wiping.
Ominimo is already lucrative, but it’s probably a modest effort. Today the beginning is active in only one market, Hungary, and focuses only on one type of insurance, car insurance for consumers. The plan is to repeat its model in more geography and category.
The company plans to expand to more than 10 new markets, starting with Poland, Sweden and the Netherlands. Zurich’s provision will serve as his risk carrier, and Omiinimo will function as a mediator, namely a general management agent, for Zurich. Starting is initially focused on securing automobiles, but aims to increase property insurance over time as well.
Dusan Komar, the Director General of Ominimo who co-founded the company with Dennis Weinbender (now the chief of awards and data) and Laslo Horvath (CTO), saw the challenges that the insurance industry faced the first hand when he worked for McKinsey. Large insurance firms, he said, were stuck because of the three main issues: solid inheritance systems that were challenging, if not impossible, to be used to start new services quickly or work with new innovations such as prices based on it; Slow decision -making processes at the corporate level; and talent.
“No excellent software engineer or data scientist dreams of working for an insurance company,” he said.
McKinsey and others like it are usually called to try to fix all three immediately. Coming and his team would build new products from the land above and “would submit the code” to the insurance client. “It worked to some extent, but not as perfect as we would hope,” he said.
Given a suggestion from the Fintech worlds and other insurance beginnings, Komar and his two co -founders saw an opportunity to develop a product like their company than for a client. They will use APIs to introduce features and functionality from other providers that they cannot build on their own, and so Ominimo was born.
Ominimo is essentially applying some reasoning based on it about large data analytics. When building and appreciating an insurance quota, a traditional insurance company can use five or six main parameters (age, economical brackets, vehicle type, past car history or car location) to determine a price. A younger insurer can add 10 or 15 more parameters to that.
“But there are some not -so -visible variables that are actually super important,” Komar said. For example, after receiving the license plate of a vehicle, you can get into a database, he said, who gives you 100 different variables regarding the vehicle, including length, height, width and weight of the vehicle. “Interesting, for example, to see that the data show a very strong link between the length of the car and the frequency of accidents during the parking lot,” he said.
Omnimo gets all these details, plus the population density and more, to perform its calculations.
Of course there are many market insurance beginnings that are already demanding the use of it across their platforms, both for decision -making in the back and improving the client’s experience in the front. Ditto the existence of dozens of startups in Fintech who also claim to have been built on it.
The answer to this is that Ominimo’s record speaks for itself. “I think what really matters is actually market performance, so if you compare our performance with Lemonade’s (a main competitor), you will actually see the difference,” he said. He claimed that Omi’s “loss ratio” is below the market average, and a 7% part of the 7% market in Hungary has already been selected, the only place where it operates.
Like many of the market neobanks – Fintech and insurance really have a lot in common – many “new” insurance players are making less interruptions under the hood as they are creating a more modern user experience.
“There is a difference between the claim to make data science in terms of risk assessment, and in fact doing it,” he said. Many of his original competitors, he believes, “actually focused on the client’s superior experience, very pleasant trips, very lean and intuitive trips. But there was not much under the hood.”
Giving talent a place to do the kind of work they want to do, he claimed, is how Ominimo has attracted and keeping the main people. “We have eight medals from the Olympics of Mathematics and Physics (prestigious competitions in these fields) among our database team,” he said. “These are really great new minds, who, now, for the first time, take to place their full potential on a global scale. And that really shows in the KPI we see.”
This is also what attracted Zurich security, which is looking for more diverse ways to bring new client waves.
“Increasing our retail with profit retail is a major ambition in the Zurich 2025-2027 cycle. That is why I am satisfied with the DA distribution partnership with OMINIMO, which will allow us to provide innovative motor insurance solutions and expand our retail client base in Europe,” Alison, CEO, CEO of Europe, the Middle East and Africa in Zurich in the Zurch group. “I am also pleased that we are strengthening our relationship with a minority of shares in OMINIMO.”
