Feather, a startup revolutionizing expat insurance in Europe with a digital-first, bespoke solution, has raised €6 million in funding. The round was led by Keen Venture Partners, along with Plural and senior leaders from Allianz, AXA and Bastian*. These investors join Monzo founder Tom Blomfield, GoCardless and Nested’s Matt Robinson, N26 CTO Gino Cordt and Oyster founder Tony Jamous on Feather’s capital table.
The funding will enable Feather to accelerate its expansion into new European markets, create a pan-European product that expatriates can carry from country to country, and make tailoring their coverage as easy as possible.
The first pan-European insurance
Feather is on a mission to change the reputation of the insurance industry by becoming the trusted digital insurance platform for expats across Europe. There are currently over 50 million expats living and working in Europe, each needing different types and levels of insurance, which has led to a surge in demand for flexible, transparent and easy-to-understand insurance solutions. The expat health insurance market alone is expected to be worth $67.92 billion by 2031.
Yet today’s insurance products are inadequate to meet the needs of this mobile workforce and student population: insurance is too complex for non-natives to understand, fragmented and not easily translatable across borders.
Feather was founded in 2018 by Rob Schumacher and Vincent Audoire while they were part of Entrepreneur First’s first Berlin cohort. After moving to Germany, the two struggled to navigate the insurance system and decided to create a bespoke platform to solve all these shortcomings. It’s the service the founders wanted: a digital platform built from the ground up to provide honest, unbiased advice and recommendations. It combines a simple, digital claims process, transparent policies, customizable plans designed for the changing needs of people who move from country to country for work, whether by choice or necessity, and human customer service without having to pay a premium. With ageing populations in many of Europe’s leading economies and increasingly reliant on hiring migrant workers, the demand for insurance products for expatriates is only going to grow.
Digital-first, seamless cross-border insurance
At the core of this approach is Feather’s purpose-built, modular, full-stack technology platform. By partnering with leading insurance companies, Feather combines the agility of a tech startup with the reliability of an established insurer. This ensures regulatory compliance while allowing Feather to manage all aspects of the insurance process, from policy documentation to claims processing, online and in-house. This not only enables Feather to reduce costs and increase responsiveness, but also provides a better user experience, backed by a 4.9-star rating on TrustPilot and Google.
Riding the momentum
After two years of bootstrapping, the company raised its first round of funding in 2021. This latest round brings the total amount raised to €10 million. To date, Feather has helped over 50,000 people in over 150 countries digitally purchase insurance. It currently serves expatriates in Germany, France and Spain, with plans to launch in three more countries by the end of 2024. This expansion, with an established platform and partnerships, has been supported by rapid growth, with its most recent foray into Spain already showing great trajectory, six months into the market, it has achieved more than Feather achieved in its first 18 months in Germany.
Rob Schumacher, co-founder of Feather, said: “Our mission has always been clear: to build an insurance platform that not only meets the needs of today’s expatriates, but also does so with transparency, simplicity and trust. This funding demonstrates confidence in our vision and technology and we are excited about the opportunities it will open up to us to even better serve the expat community across Europe.”
Taavet Hinrikus, Partner at Plural, said: “Feather is disrupting the complex and highly regulated insurance industry with its laser-focused expatriate needs, best-in-class technology platform, great founders and market fit. There are many similarities with Wise’s growth and trajectory, and Feather’s early success is a clear sign of things to come. It’s exciting to see the first real signs of international traction as they build over the coming years.”
Keen’s Abdul Afridi said: “Feather’s approach to InsurTech stands out in a crowded market. Their expat experience resonated with me as a fellow expat, but what sold me on this investment was the robust technology and clear path to scalability that Rob and Vincent have built. We believe in Feather’s vision for a truly pan-European insurance product and are excited to help them achieve this mission.”
