We’re Travis and Sam, co-founders of Vouch Insurance (
https://vouch.us).
Vouch is a new insurance company that provides business insurance for startups. We make it easy for founders to get all of the business insurance they need as they build their companies -- ranging from basic coverage for business property through to more complex coverages such as Directors and Officers (D&O), Errors and Omissions (E&O), Cyber, Employment Practices Liability and a range of others that companies need to close financings, scale their teams, do deals and take on office leases. Moreover, these policies protect against painful but all too frequent risks that we all face as we build our businesses.
We started Vouch after seeing how painful it is to get insurance the old way, and also experiencing many of the risk events that all-too-often happen as one scales a company. Previously I co-founded and led the U.S. arm of Funding Circle, a role I held up until our IPO last year; through this experience I had to purchase insurance many times -- and each time, the experience was slow, painful, opaque, and paper-based. Travis previously worked at Silicon Valley Bank and say that pain-point across their portfolio and, at the same time, saw the interesting developments in other insurance sectors -- Root, in auto insurance, for example -- and similarly believed that there must be a better way for startups to buy and manage their insurance. Although there’s been a lot of work done on the distribution side of insurance (better agent and brokerage-type businesses) no one has really tried to build better insurance products tailored to meet the needs of startups.
Traditionally, a founder needs to go through a broker to purchase the coverages we offer directly, and that process can take weeks, or even months (it took us over 60 days to get the E&O coverage we needed at Vouch to start writing business, as one ironic example). We designed the Vouch experience so that a typical company can get everything they need in under 10 minutes and with 0 paperwork. We also tailored the insurance products we’re offering to meet the unique needs of technology startups. As a result of this, our hope is that the entire experience should feel more tailored, and basic policies are quite affordable -- as little as $200/year. Our basic package is 30% cheaper than anything else we’ve seen in the market and on average we’re seeing our members save ~13% relative to other options.
We started the company after years of experience building and investing in other companies. Our view is that building a company is hard enough -- worrying about risk management and insurance shouldn’t be, and we’re building Vouch so that can be the case. We’re now live in eight states, and are excited to say that we can now serve companies based in CA -- a state that’s home to many startups. We’ll be in many states all across the country shortly, as we want to help entrepreneurs wherever they’re building great technology companies.
If you have questions about business insurance or any current insurance needs we’d love to connect. And we’d welcome reactions, feedback and any of your experiences around business insurance. Thanks for reading and if of interest check us out at: https://vouch.us
Vouch is not able to proceed with my application because I run a bootstrapped business – zero funding and no debt. Vouch's current underwriting guidelines require at least $150,000 in funding, which seems odd.
I'm not sure why this is the case - if anything, my business has a much lower risk profile, since I have fewer counterparties, and don't have the exposures that would necessitate D&O, EPL, EB, or FD.
I hope this is something that Vouch will discuss with the reinsurer. I've been looking for a service like this for years now, and I'd like to vote with my dollars.