Urban Jungle's series A and what's next from Co-founder and CEO Jimmy Williams
It’s been great to announce Urban Jungle's $11.4m Series A funding round this week, which is a huge vindication of the work our amazing team have been doing over the last year despite everything the world outside has thrown at them.
In this post, I wanted to both share a reminder about what makes Urban Jungle special, and how we’ll use this new capital to make it even more special.
We have always been laser focused on doing 3 things:
Reinventing how insurance products are built
We stand against one-size-fits all insurance. We know who our customer is, talk to them, and build what they need, with all the flexibility they need for it to change when their life does. No one else sweats the small stuff in insurance products like we do.
Transforming access to insurance
Insurance has made itself an easy target for fraudsters by being so slow to use technology, and fraud is rife. The industry has responded by making it the default to say no to anything they don’t consider ‘standard’. The result is out and out discrimination. We throw everything that modern data science has to offer at stopping fraud, which allows us to help the huge number of customers the industry has left behind.
Raising the bar
We not only innovate, we constantly challenge so many bad habits the industry has let take hold. We’ve pioneered genuinely monthly contracts, default to 100% digital access, stand against hidden fees, don’t price on anything you can’t control (like age, how long you’ve lived in the country, housing tenure) and are building a green supply chain. We want to take the industry with us, and change the way the world of insurance works, forever.
The good news is that this isn’t some pipe dream. It's working.
We only launched our first renters insurance policy just over 2 years ago, and we’ve grown to over 40,000 customers, whilst managing to both be one of the highest rated home insurance providers in the UK (4.8 out of 5 on Trustpilot, with over 2,000 five star reviews), and at the same time make the insurers and reinsurers who back us plenty of money, a combined feat that is vanishingly rare amongst our peers.
What do you do when something is working? You do exactly the same thing in more places.
We started with renters because that’s where our own pain had been, and we’ve still got plenty of space to grow and get better there, but as we’ve gone along we’ve uncovered more and more groups of customers who have their own pain with insurance. It’s not the same pain, but it is just as strong, and we can see a clear path to fixing it.
This additional capital will mean that we can not only keep scaling in our core, but we can also enter new markets and start helping more and more different types of customers. We believe that we’ve got a sustainable platform, capable of becoming the worlds go-to insurance brand, and are super excited about going out to prove that.
That doesn’t mean that we’ll be launching into markets willy-nilly. We always aim to lead where we play. That doesn’t just mean speed of growth and scale, it means markets where we believe we can genuinely and strongly innovate and differentiate to make life better for customers, and you’ll see us starting to make some big plays in the coming weeks.
The greatest joy of raising capital is that it gives you the ability to bring in even more amazing talent to help you on your journey. We’ll be doubling the team in the next year or so, and already have a number of open roles. Do send us your nicest and most talented friends, and of course, watch this space!
