Israeli-Founded Insurtech Firm Hippo Secures $350M Investment With Japanese Group

Israeli-founded insurance tech startup Hippo raised $350 million in a fresh funding round with Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance Company, a subsidiary of Japan’s MS&AD Insurance Group – the fifth largest non-life insurance group in the world and first in Japan. The companies announced the investment on Tuesday and said they would also sign a reinsurance treaty where Mitsui Sumitomo will take on a portion of risk to support Hippo.

MS&AD Ventures, the corporate VC fund of MS&AD Insurance Group, participated in Hippo’s previous fundraising round in July of $150 million, at a valuation of $1.5 billion. Investors in Hippo have included Dragoneer Investment Group and Bond Capital, a fund that has also invested in major companies such as Airbnb, Houzz, Waze, Slack, and Uber.

As part of this investment round, MS&AD Ventures’ managing partner Takashi Sato will join Hippo’s board of directors as an observer, the companies said.

The investment will support Hippo’s product roll out in additional states, “to reach 95 percent of the US homeowners population in the next year, as well as providing additional capital for its insurance and reinsurance companies,” the parties said.

Hippo was founded in January 2015 by Israeli-born CEO Assaf Wand, and CTO Eyal Navon, and is based in Palo Alto, California. It made its debut in the insurance marketplace in April 2017 and now offers homeowners’ insurance in 33 states.

The company’s policies are built on public data sets from municipal building records, and satellite imagery of physical property characteristics, promising clients a user experience that lasts just a few minutes. It also allows customers to save up to 25 percent on premiums, and obtain smarter coverage for household goods like appliances and consumer electronics. In addition to insurance, Hippo also provides complimentary smart home devices to clients to protect homeowners against water leaks, fire damage and break-ins.

“Mitsui Sumitomo is one of the best when it comes to risk management and shares our desire to leverage data and analytics to create better outcomes for homeowners,” said Wand. “We’re excited to deepen our partnership and gain additional catastrophe modeling expertise from one of the world’s largest insurers.”

“We value the innovation that Hippo brought to the home insurance space through its advanced classification of risk,” said Shinichiro Funabiki, Director, VP Executive Officer at Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance Company. “We look forward to learning from one another through our strategic partnership, providing high value-added products and services to customers of both companies in the US and Japan, and to continue to support Hippo, which quickly became a top insurtech in the US home insurance space and is beloved by its customers.”