Investment in Innovation to Rock Chicago Stadium at Insurtech Conference

Three stages, a packed football stadium overlooking Lake Michigan, decked out luxury suites.

A rock concert? No, it’s an insurance innovation and investment event. But some attendees might be star-struck by the industry heavyweights in attendance at the OnRamp Insurance Conference, which takes place at Chicago’s Soldier Field on April 12.

The one-day event is designed to bring together startup entrepreneurs, insurance company representatives and investors for a highly programmed mixer in which innovators and those seeking entrepreneurial talent or investment opportunities meet, network and learn from each other.

Troy Vosseller, co-founder of both the OnRamp Conference Series and the startup accelerator, gener8tor, that spawned the conference series, says 30 insurance carriers will be participating in the event this year. Each carrier will “have their own suite or luxury box. They’ll be populated typically by people from their corporate venture capital, corporate innovation, strategy or business development teams,” he said.

Around 330 startups from around the world applied to participate in the event, which is free for startups that attend.

The list of 330 startup applicants is shared with the corporations and investors in attendance, and “based on a mutual opt-in, we schedule the meeting with the corporation and the startup at the conference, to take place in [the company’s suite] at the stadium,” Vosseller said.

Corporations on average will meet with 10 startups at the OnRamp conference. But with access to the full list of conference applicants available to them, companies may in the future choose to take a look at other startups that might have a compatible product or service to offer, Vosseller said.

The conference has three tracks that each feature keynote speakers, product demos, fireside chats and panel discussions.

Vosseller said the OnRamp conferences, like gener8tor, are “industry agnostic.” That is, both the conferences and the startup accelerator serve a variety of industries, though insurance is the “oldest and largest industry we operate in.”

The conferences grew out of the accelerator, which Vosseller started with his business partner Joe Kirgues in 2012. But the events are totally separate entities and are open to startups that have not gone through the gener8tor program.

Beyond Insurtech

The startups attending the conference are largely technology-oriented, but they may not fit a conventional definition of an insurtech company — that is, one that works specifically within the insurance industry, like an aggregator, Vosseller said.

To Vosseller, the concept of insurtech is “broad. It’s any technology that can be enabling to an insurance carrier or provide insight even to an insurance carrier and their business, both their current business as well as emerging lines of business or future lines of business.”

When looking at insurance carrier venture capital activity, Vosseller sees companies expanding their interests into what he calls “a horizontal set of technology.”

For instance, he said, Madison, Wisconsin-based American Family Insurance, a company that gener8tor has worked closely with, recently made investments in two startups that Vosseller describes as horizontal technology. They are “still relevant to insurance, very much relevant to insurance, but they’re not insurtech proper.”

One such investment was in “Networked Insights, a startup that did machine learning and artificial intelligence, really focusing on social media and gathering insights that could then be used for marketing purposes. That was an investment made by American Family Ventures and subsequently acquired by American Family Insurance, and that’s really educated and infused a lot of learning into their marketing practices. Again, not necessarily insurance specific, but have high degree of applicability to the insurance industry,” he said.

Another example he cited was American Family Ventures’ investment in “Ring, the video doorbell. Again, not an insurance company themselves, but … they have a value proposition around home safety and preventing burglaries and things of that nature, very much relevant to insurance carriers.”

Vosseller said the conference tries to highlight and attract startups that might fit into the category of an insurtech vertical, “but also these horizontal technologies, be it autonomous vehicles, or artificial intelligence, or Internet of Things, or you name it, to participate in these one-on-one pitches with the carriers, but then also to spotlight some of these new and emerging technologies for the conference agenda itself as well.”

He added that he thinks it’s a great time to be a startup interested in selling into the insurance industry. “There’s such a confluence of factors that are putting the wind at your back. The first is that there’s just been a tremendous rise in the amount of corporate venture capital activity, specifically with insurance.”

In addition, insurance companies are facing disruption, or what happens in the industry when new technologies, such as autonomous vehicles, come into maturity. What happens to their industry when technology companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon are interested in getting into the insurance marketplace?

“I think [insurance carriers] cautious about all these new entrants into the marketplace and new technologies, and I think that they’re being proactive in terms of making sure that they’re part of that conversation when it comes to new technology,” Vosseller said.

Topics Carriers InsurTech Tech Market Training Development