Alex Maffeo, founder and chief executive officer of InsurTech startup Boost Insurance, didn’t dream of working in insurance when he was a kid. He wanted to play shortstop for the Yankees or be the guy hanging off the back of one of those big, heavy-duty garbage trucks.
Executive Summary
Boost Insurance CEO and Founder Alex Maffeo explains his personal motivation for launching an InsurTech development platform—his own experience with the glacial go-to-market pace of bringing a new insurance product to life and his realization that InsurTech startups lacking the industry connections he accessed at his prior employer, the VC firm IA Capital, would face even bigger obstacles.He did focus on insurance during his venture capitalist career, but starting a company to boost the insurance industry into new technology wasn’t on his radar.
In 2018, Boost Insurance secured reinsurance capacity commitments from some of the most innovative and formidable capital providers in the reinsurance industry: Nephila, Markel Digital and RenaissanceRe, which sit behind Boost’s fronting carrier partner State National. Boost also launched its first program with fellow InsurTech startup Paladin Cyber and has a handful more programs ready for launch in early 2019. In December 2018, just before the holidays and about one year after starting to build Boost, Carrier Management met with Maffeo over a cup of coffee to ask him about the process leading to the formation of the company and challenges he’s faced along the way.
