Seedstars Kuala Lumpur Winner PolicyStreet raises 500'000 USD in Seed Funding from the KK Fund to Revolutionize the Insurance Sector
PolicyStreet, an online marketing and technology partner for insurance providers has raised RM 2,100,000 (USD 500,000) in seed funding from KK Fund, a Singapore-based venture capital fund. With this injection of funds, the company is embarking on its journey of curating new impactful insurance products and is now seeking more collaboration from industry players, corporates and groups to propel the insurance industry to the next level.
Founded in Jan 2017, PolicyStreet has changed the way insurance is marketed and sold by making insurance sexy, fun and relevant. According to Lee Yen Ming, co-founder and CEO of PolicyStreet, “We want to change the perception of insurance by providing the right education and awareness. We are not about just selling insurance and to us getting insurance is not just a one-off transaction. We believe insurance is a prerequisite in all stages of life and we take pride in being present in our customer’s life journey. We do this by hand-picking relevant bite-sized products and curating new ones because we believe existing products are just not enough to meet the different needs of consumers. And most of these products are products that insurance agents would not sell as the price points are too low for them to earn a reasonable commission.”
The company deploys an Offline-to-Online approach where they target various groups of like-minded people and address their needs before getting them to purchase and complete transactions via its portal without the need of having a physical form.
The public continue to perceive owning an insurance policy as one of the least priorities in life. This lack of understanding, need and trust of the industry have resulted in only 1 out of every 2 Malaysians being insured. PolicyStreet hopes to provide an avenue for direct awareness, education and knowledge so that consumers can make informed decisions regarding their protection needs. Their added-value of simpler, easier and more affordable solutions play a key role in bridging the country’s protection gap and meeting the envisioned 75% insurance penetration rate by 2020.
On April 2017, PolicyStreet announced a partnership with UForLife, the largest online term life provider in Malaysia to allows consumers to directly purchase UForLife’s term life policies from as low as RM9.85 per month. In a short span of time, they have underwritten more than RM70 million of pure protection in terms of sum assured and hopes to get more Malaysians insured with this basic term life protection.
Koichi Saito, Founder and General Partner from KK Fund also added, “We have been searching for InsurTech space for a while and finally met a solid management team with the right business model. Receiving an insurance quote online is still challenging here in SEA. We highly evaluate that PolicyStreet understands the importance of Offline function in this industry and has been profitable since day one by leveraging the robust network of the management team and advisory board coming from the insurance industry.”
PolicyStreet, co-founded by Yen Ming, Wilson Beh, Winnie Chua and Jason Lee, recently also won the Malaysia round of Seedstars World, the world’s largest seed-stage startup competition and will be representing Malaysia in the Seedstars Summit in Switzerland next year.
With this round of funding, PolicyStreet aims to build a stronger team and develop new innovative insurance products using technology.
For collaboration opportunities with PolicyStreet, please email to [email protected].
For more information on PolicyStreet, please visit https://www.policystreet.com/.