It's No Accident; Why We're Betting on Spot - Injury Insurance for People with Active Lifestyles
“Fear of injury can get in the way of living our best lives.” – Spot Co-CEO/Founder, Matt Randall
It’s No Accident. Why We Are Betting on Spot - Injury Insurance for People with Active Lifestyles
By Collin West & Katalina Veal
Ensemble VC is excited to share that we’ve led a $25M Series A in Spot Insurance with participation from Sozo Ventures, GreatPoint Ventures, and Silverton Partners.
Why we invested: Spot is fundamentally changing how insurance coverage is leveraged and accessed by people with active lifestyles.
According to a Bankrate Survey, less than half of Americans have enough savings to cover a $1,000 unplanned expense. In other words, more than half the country would need to find another way to fund an emergency room visit. Furthermore, many adults and youth with active lifestyles either do not have health insurance or are covered by a high deductible plan. Because of these factors, many people avoid some of life’s greatest adventures, such as skiing, cycling, adventure racing, and recreational sports, due to fear of injury and a massive medical bill.
Introducing Spot Insurance: Spot offers short-term accident and injury insurance coverage that’s conveniently embedded into the point-of-sale checkout for active events.
“We have an opportunity to change the way people live their lives. Right now, fear of injury and a major medical bill stop many from new active experiences. Now, with Spot, people can try a sport or activity that they may have otherwise avoided - they can participate with confidence knowing that any injury will be covered up to $25K.”
Spot’s newest board member and Ensemble co-founder, Collin West shares, “We were so impressed by the energy, commitment and experience of co-founders Matt Randall and Maria Goy. Their mission to efficiently distribute insurance coverage to enable more people to live their lives worry-free was so powerful that we had to get involved.”
During Goy’s time at New York Life Insurance as one of the youngest executives, she realized the importance of attending to the needs of customers. Creating more transparency and giving customers the opportunity to purchase what they need, when they need it, allows insurance businesses to better serve each customer.
Randall, an avid cyclist and skier, has over 15 years of venture-backed experience and joined forces with Goy to create a business model around convenient and affordable plans that cover the actual cost of medical bills.
Our first question: How big is this market?
When we first met Spot, our immediate thoughts related to how big this could get. Initially, we wildly underestimated the sheer number of active events where easy and affordable accident and injury insurance at check out would be wanted. During Spot’s first debut of offering its coverage for $6 in the check out flow of Austin Marathon tickets, Spot experienced a 9% conversion rate (% of customers buying Spot at check out)! To put this into perspective, flight travel insurance has a 2% conversion rate and is already a $36B market.
In addition, numerous event registration sites have an average of 10K events each with hundreds or thousands of participants.
Partners
Statistics show that the second most common reason for why people don’t ski is fear of injury. Spot has already found a deep vein of customers in the skiing world, a potentially billion dollar market for Spot on its own. Spot also partners with more than 20 other organizations and that list is growing daily.
“Spot is the AAA of the cycling world. Everyone needs to have it!”
On working with Ensemble, Randall shares, “VC funds have a reputation for often over-promising and under-delivering. Ensemble is the opposite of that. Collin has already made an impact on the board, and Ensemble’s recruiting team is leveraging their data platform to help fill new roles as we scale. When we first met Ensemble, Maria slack messaged me saying ‘I love these guys!’”
“We want active people to understand that we are building this just for them. It is not only a good business, it’s also good for people. Don’t pray nothing happens, protect yourself and purchase only what you need, when you need it, for a very reasonable price.” said Randall.
If you share Spot’s mission, check out their open roles and be sure to follow to see when they launch in your city!