Two years ago, when Michael Fitzgerald, a senior analyst at Celent, was interviewing Tim Attia, the CEO of Slice Labs, Fitzgerald asked Attia how much it cost to launch the InsurTech’s first product.

“Excuse me,” Fitzgerald recalls saying when Attia responded, unsure that he possibly could have heard the answer correctly—”under $4 million.” In the scheme of things—in terms of what insurers typically pay to get a product to market, the figure seemed unusually small.