Scouting for Growth

On this episode, Sabine VdL interviews Nigel Walsh, formerly Managing Director, Insurance at Google and now global head of insurance at ServiceNow. Nigel is on a mission to make Insurance loveable. He spends his days helping insurance carriers unlock the power of Google Cloud and Alphabet, supporting startups, building communities, creating MGAs, writing papers, and more. KEY TAKEAWAYS In the last 15 years, I’ve truly fallen in love with insurance. I think it’s got a huge purpose, it’s massively misunderstood and misloved. You only have to step out of our little bubble of friends to your everyday friends, who don’t work in insurance, and ask them their perception or impression of insurance, and it’s not good. My desire is to turn that into something as joyful, delightful, and exciting as an experience of buying something online or engaging digitally in different ways. I love that the organization that I work for is so inclusive, beyond anything I’ve ever seen in my life. We have 9 products with over a billion active daily users, so you have to be able to manage, understand, and design for everyone when you do that. Through an insurance lens, we have some of the smartest people on the planet thinking about things and helping stretch your imagination in so many different ways. The platforms that we’ve got that surround our core technologies and cloud – like being able to look things up on YouTube, not just Google – give us the ability to help educate the world in a very, very different way. My ambition is to string those pieces together, not just to close the protection gap, but also to close the education gap, so everyone has access and an understanding of what we’re doing going forward. Big corporations and individuals are physically transferring money into this new world (the Metaverse – which could be a fad like SecondLife and Clubhouse), then you’re also automatically creating risk, and that risk could be or should be protected. The most obvious threat in the Metaverse is cybercrime, which costs the industry billions of dollars year on year. And now we’ve opened up a whole new world and a new level of risk. We should now also spend some time exploring and understanding what these risks mean for customers and insurance carriers alike. BEST MOMENTS ‘Our ability to enable large insurance carriers, small startups, and everything in-between with what we have, I felt like a stronger opportunity to be a force for good as we go to support consumers, corporates, and so much more.’ ‘Over the last couple of years, especially in lockdown, I found solace in the InsurTech community, who were sharing their success stories, especially in their exercise schedules. They’re always striving to move forward.’ ‘I don’t read as many books as I used to, but I love listening to podcasts because you can listen and learn while going about your day. We, as tech providers, service providers, and insurers, have to recognize how people choose to learn more and more today.’ ‘Never before have we moved this quickly, but never again will we move this slowly. People will never want to go back, given our access to video conferencing and online food delivery. The question is, how do we take more giant steps forward now?’ ABOUT THE GUEST LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights. And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at [email protected]

In this episode, Sabine VdL interviews Andrew Cons, who was the CEO of Bolttech’s European operations at the time of the recording. Now leading Bolttech in Indonesia. He discusses his leadership journey, including acquiring expertise over the years in strategy, business improvement, and founding his own venture. KEY TAKEAWAYS Bolttech has grown from a PowerPoint deck to a unicorn in just two years. It was different from the outset from anything I’d ever done before, and that’s what really attracted me to the business. I had set up my own business before, but this is unique in what we’re trying to do here. It’s a results-driven business, and I’m a results-driven person, but I really love driving innovation and seeing that through to fruition, so when Bottech came to me, I couldn’t really say no because it was such a great opportunity. The two big experiences where I’ve experienced great growth have been, obviously, here with Bolttech, building it from the ground up has been an amazing experience, and leading it from the front, setting the example, and building the culture in your own image is both exciting and a very privileged position to be in. Secondly, it was building out Asurion across Asia/Pacific, another major growth path I pursued. Both paths bring a lot of pressure, but the pressure of growing a mature, stable business at lightning speed while simultaneously identifying and converting growth opportunities to make that happen is a privileged position to be in. We connect insurers with distribution partners and then end customers. We’ve made a pretty good start on that mission so far, and we achieved unicorn status with the largest ever Series A funding round for an InsurTech. To date, we’ve raised over $247 million from some key strategic investors. At the center of our business is the largest insurance exchange in the world, and we now transact over $44 billion in quoted premiums annually. We see the digital ecosystem and ourselves as enablers for our partners and customers to gain the right protection at the time of need, which is really important. As a platform, we are the gel that enables insurance carriers and distribution partners to deliver great insurance products on demand. BEST MOMENTS ‘I fell into insurance, but I’ve really enjoyed all the roles I’ve had as well as starting up my own venture, and whether it’s leaving transformational change to building successful businesses from the ground up, I’ve certainly learned a lot on the way.’ ‘I’ve been really lucky to build an amazing leadership team and organization that I believe is the best InsurTech business in Europe.’ ‘We’re a many-to-many ecosystem for our partners and customers; we bring them together.’ ‘Our mission is to become the world’s leading technologically enabled ecosystem. To deliver on that mission, we’ve developed the world’s largest insurance exchange, but on top of that, we offer 5,000 insurance products – and growing – and we work with over 180 insurance providers to give that choice and quality of experience to our end customers.’ ABOUT THE GUEST Andrew Cons leads the Bolttech teams in Indonesia, providing strategic and dynamic leadership as Bolttech builds the next generation of insurance services, protections, and ecosystems for Bolttech's existing and new partners in the European region. His experience spans a portfolio of businesses and a track record of results, including extensive board-level leadership across technology, operations, and digital transformation. Andrew leads an agile, future-ready team that is focused on expanding Bolttech’s reach by driving sustainable growth in Europe. Outside of work, he enjoys traveling, golfing, and spending time with his family. ABOUT THE HOST Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and trust. On Scouting for Growth, she decodes how real growth happens—where capital, collaboration, and courage meet. If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights. And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at [email protected]

In this episode, Sabine VdL interviews Robin Kiera, the most renowned European FinTech and InsurTech influencer. He set up Digital Scouting in 2017 as a platform that now has 400,000 followers, which is not insignificant in this industry. Robin is a thought leader, an entrepreneur, and a senior leader who has worked in finance for years and gives practical tools and techniques around lessons to learn in the FinTech and InsurTech sectors. KEY TAKEAWAYS Life can be ironic. I don’t like marketing agencies' guys, and I really despise consultants! I started as an insurance sales agent, from the ground up, on commission for selling insurance policies on the streets of Hamburg. I always said that between me and the CEO of Allianz are 27 different levels of hierarchy; between me and the one below me was just the street. I saw a huge gap between what insurance can be: helping people, protecting them against risks in our lives, and the reality of selling insurance, which didn’t have a lot to do with the desire and the demand of the buyer. At the beginning of the month, we had a list of clients to call, but the lists didn't include any information about their situations. We were not on our clients' minds; they were going to banks and building societies. When I founded Digital Scouting years later, and we were crushing it on social media, we found our clients were standing in line. I remember thinking this was quite a different way to sell than I had been doing previously. We started a blog with thought leadership pieces, attended conferences around the world, and brought ideas back home from entrepreneurial start-ups so we could sell our policies like an iPhone or other Apple products. We have very good, brilliant people working in the insurance industry. But it seems to me that most insurance ecosystems – in countries like Germany, France, Britain, and the US – have nothing in common, no exchange, yet there are so many interesting use cases in Britain, France, and the US that I really wanted to get to know what’s going on. I wanted to see the international trends. That’s what made me want to bring these great ideas back to Germany. When I announced that I was leaving Allianz to join an online gaming company that had been around for only 3 years, people were calling the company doctor to see if I was feeling OK. How could I leave that security? Sometimes you lull yourself into a false sense of security. Once I decided to start my own business, I just had to do it because you can still go back to great stable and corporate jobs in this industry or another sector. I don’t want to regret anything when I lay my head on the pillow for the last time. BEST MOMENTS Everybody says: “We don’t sell products, we consult”. Yeah, alright, let’s talk at the end of the year.’ ‘People tell me “Robin, you’re the rebel of the industry”.’ ‘I think everybody likes frictionless transactions, not just Generations Y and Z. And their tolerance when it comes to incompetence and friction is certainly getting lower, which I think is just right.’ ‘There were no downs in building my business; we always grew organically. Any downs were brought about by my own stupid mistakes, like keeping a bad tax advisor for too long... things like that.’ ABOUT THE GUEST Dr. Robin Kiera is the Founder and CEO of Digital Scouting, a consulting and marketing agency based in Germany. Robin is an author, renowned speaker, entrepreneur, and top-ranked insurance and finance influencer. He started Digital Scouting as an after-work hobby that grew into a multimedia B2C, B2B, and B2B2C consulting and marketing agency – supporting entrepreneurs, c-suite executives, and start-ups in their digital transformations, market entry, and in hacking the attention of customers and partners through digital media. Before being recognized as the “Attention Hacker” in the insurance and finance industry, he was labeled the “Rebel of Industry,” radically exposing the elephant in the room through targeted topics he tackled in his on-stage rants, videos, and blogs. Being genuine in his contributions, he was recognized in top industry rankings and supported by more than 140,000 followers when he started generating 16 million in monthly reach. ABOUT THE HOST Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and trust. On Scouting for Growth, she decodes how real growth happens—where capital, collaboration, and courage meet. If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights. And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at [email protected]

In this episode, Sabine VdL interviews Minh Tran, founding partner of Mandalore Partners (and also her co-founder at Alchemy Crew) about the world of Venture Capital Funds. He has worked in the Corporate VC world for 30 years, most recently in financial services, and founded Mandalore Partners 10 years ago. KEY TAKEAWAYS When you are a Corporate Venturer you have two models, one is to invest in VC outside – that’s not really a corporate venture, but you have that option, the second is to create your own team internally, for many reasons, this model hasn’t worked in the long run. I came up with a third model: externalizing corporate venture funds to reach out to startups with both financial interests and strategic alignment with corporates. This is Venture Capital as a Service. Resilience comes from lateral thinking, too, when investing. You can enter the market of your core industry, but you can also reach out to new industries that can impact your core industry. If you’re a retailer, you invest in your core business, but FinTech could disrupt retail finance, so you could reach out to FinTech ventures, not just retail. So you’re prepared for disruption. SIDE – Source, Invest, Develop, Exit. Each step of our process has been optimized. Source is the ability to source better than a corporation; we combine public data (Crunchbase) with private data (corporate assignments) to compile a list of startups. We then invest like a VC. We develop a portfolio management plan like a VC, but I do things differently, more hands-on than VCs. Then Exit, again I use VC techniques to exit at some point with or without the corporate. Like any VC I look at if the market is growing, how the product would fit in the market, what is the business model/plan, and what is the team? I also look at a fifth element: The leverage we can access from the corporation. This could help accelerate the startup or its valuation. BEST MOMENTS ‘The Mandalore Partners name came from a planet from Star Wars because I wanted to look to the future, and I found out it was a good name to have because it was about mobility, globality, tech, and now The Mandalorian TV series.’ ‘There’s a bad reputation to having a corporate venture fund in the market that has the same name as your corporation, this is why externalizing VC activities and having a different name is attracting more startups to our fund while also providing the returns the corporates want.’ ‘When we talk to corporates when they’re looking to InsurTech, and they want to be exposed to another tech, an external model can help you assess the new industries you seek where you have, or you don’t have expertise.’ ‘I focus a lot of work on where to invest to have the best impact tools and platforms.’ ABOUT THE GUEST Minh is the Managing Partner of Mandalore Partners, which seeks to create an innovative framework that enables early-stage firm investors to achieve scale exposure to a range of traditional, alternative, and tech venture capital assets. In addition to his experience as a founding team member at AXA Ventures, Minh was also an integral part of several other VC firms, including Nokia Ventures, Bertelsmann Ventures, and Truffle Capital. ABOUT THE HOST Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and trust. On Scouting for Growth, she decodes how real growth happens—where capital, collaboration, and courage meet. If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights. And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at [email protected]

On this episode, Sabine VdL interviews Elisa Vlerick, a partner at Ninepointfive Ventures, the Venture Capitalist dedicated to Corporate Venturing. Elisa loves removing syntax complexity from the proverbial crap, applying creativity and execution to everything she does. KEY TAKEAWAYS Corporate Venturing differs from traditional VC activity in that you have the power/leverage of a corporation to scale faster and gain what we call an unfair competitive advantage in the market. That really attracted me to Ninepointfive. Often, there’s a lot of resistance within companies to cannibalize their own business or start new ventures that are often very small. For billion-dollar companies, it’s hard to start something new that doesn't fully fit into the existing company. They also don’t always have the skills or the right people to implement a new business model, and there’s sometimes not the appetite because the new business would be so small compared to the main business, so it wouldn’t get the attention it deserves. We built the venture with the corporation because it aligns with the corporation's strategic interests. What we want to build together with them is a successful company with financial returns. If the strategic interests are not aligned with the financial objective we have, we’re usually not the right partner. The assumption is that tech-y people aren’t female. It’s like doctors, 20-30 years ago, 90% of doctors were male and 90% of nurses were female, nowadays it’s 50/50, if not more female doctors. I think it’s a matter of time, 1-20 years, and it will even out in our industry. It’s said women are more risk-averse or less daring – and maybe there’s something in that – but once this idea that it’s really challenging and daring to start a startup is gone, I don’t see a reason why this wouldn’t go up to 50/50. BEST MOMENTS ‘Our team is very interesting because we come from different angles and that makes our decision-making and investment processes more interesting and, hopefully, better.’ ‘Taking the whole activity outside the corporate, with our knowledge of building startups, fuelled by the resources from the corporate, makes a startup better placed in the market than a regular startup.’ ‘The key to our success is finding the right people to make it happen. You can have a great financial plan, but it needs to happen, and it can only happen if the team is there.’ ‘Surround yourself with people that are better than you and will dare to go against the tide, or criticise the prevailing opinion, they’re going to make better decisions.’ ABOUT THE GUEST When complexity threatens to get the upper hand, Elisa picks up her pen. With that pen, she cuts through the proverbial crap and to the bone. Elisa is resolute in her belief that strong business ideas can only prosper when ambiguity and prejudice are left at the door. When things are clear, creativity can flourish. From there onward, she’ll tell you: “le bonheur est dans l’action”. ABOUT THE HOST Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and trust. On Scouting for Growth, she decodes how real growth happens—where capital, collaboration, and courage meet. If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights. And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at [email protected]

On this episode, Sabine VdL interviews IBM’s David Kwon about how insurance companies have had to navigate a decade of societal change. From the financial crisis and the rise of digital technology to changing consumer expectations, insurers face challenges that are fundamentally altering the very core of our industry. Does the question remain whether property and casualty insurers will be able to keep pace with societal changes over time? Are they focusing on the right priorities? And what about life insurance – is BigTech making any headway here to challenge established practices? In this episode, they discuss these trends and examine how insurers can best position themselves for success during this period of rapid transformation. KEY TAKEAWAYS To remain relevant, insurers must find ways to embrace change while ensuring profitability amid blurred competitive boundaries. While some insurers have embraced the new environment with open arms, others seem reluctant to adapt or even acknowledge potential growth opportunities. Mass-personalisation is the goal of every large insurer, not just for consumer products, but also for insurers targeting B2B customers as well. The technology has evolved to a point where videos on a website can be personalized to each person, not just seeing your name on a website, but addressing you by your first name, referencing your family, etc. There are many new risk pools, including self-driving cars. There are six levels of autonomy here, ranging from cruise control to full autonomy. Up to level 4, the liability is still with the driver, but as AI takes on a bigger role in driving, insurance writers now have to start thinking of AI as a risk, just like the driver. At level 5, where there’s no steering wheel, it becomes a product liability issue, and the responsibility shifts from the driver to the manufacturer, which is a completely different business. It also impacts home and auto bundling. The overall auto market will start to shrink as more people buy autonomous cars. For insurers, this is an interesting time; we’re beginning to see new risks emerging as the foundations of risk are getting more attention than before. There are 3 big disruptive technologies: IoT, AI, and hybrid cloud. BEST MOMENTS ‘Covid has exposed the vulnerability of the interconnected world, the western world was hit first and suffered faster before it spread to third world countries.’ ‘Science and technology are key to solving the toughest challenges in our society.’ ‘The days of easily targeting users by buying third-party data are passing us quickly. Insurers must now focus on first-party data by engaging directly with the prospects and policyholders and getting the data themselves through deeper engagement and better experience.’ ‘Covid accelerated e-commerce by about 2 years. All businesses, even small ones, are relying on technology more than ever before.’ ABOUT THE GUEST David Kwon is a sought-after Digital Reinvention Executive for IBM’s largest US and international insurance and banking clients. David is an associate partner within IBM Business Transformation Services and a member of the IBM Industry Academy. David has delivered over 60 strategy and transformation projects as an engagement leader and in executive strategic roles, ranging from digital strategy, customer experience, and business case for change. ABOUT THE HOST Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and trust. On Scouting for Growth, she decodes how real growth happens—where capital, collaboration, and courage meet. If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights. And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at [email protected]

On this episode, Sabine VdL interviews Dr. Dietmar Kottmann, a Partner of Oliver Wyman in Munich and a member of the insurance and digital practices. Dietmar has more than 20 years of experience in management and strategic consulting. During this time, he has led numerous projects on strategy, IT, operational strategy, organisation, and digitisation. He leads insurance in the DACH region and is the lead author of the “InsurTech radar” series. KEY TAKEAWAYS One of the most negative examples I had in my consulting career was in the .com days. We did a large ecommerce strategy project for one of the large travel players and the core strategy we recommended for them, we know today with hindsight that it was the right strategy because it was later executed by a startup, but the client was unable to execute it. Even though it was intellectually spot on, we were unable to set the client up for success. That keeps me awake at night. Consulting is not R&D, or what you do at university; it’s generating real impact for your clients. Oliver Wyman – more or less – has three kinds of clients 1) financial sponsors who want to invest in (digital) insurance businesses, 2) customers who want to build something new in the InsurTech space, 3) helping our incumbent clients transform and become more successful in the digital world. This last one is our bread and butter. There are always three kinds of innovation: 1) efficiency innovations – reducing waste, 20 sustaining innovations – making the product better every year with features, coverages, engagement models, 3) market creating innovations – where you think about how the market is changing and where you position yourself for future success. When you think about a problem, you have to start with someone whose life you might want to improve – a company or an individual. What progress are they seeking – functional, emotional, social? All three must be considered to help the customer. That is the most fun part of the business, really thinking about what we’re doing in a fundamental way, going much, much deeper, being much more interesting, and playing to my curiosity than “how can I advance the next generation of my product”. BEST MOMENTS ‘I started my career on the nerd side of the universe, playing with computers and programming on a Sinclair Zx81. Since then, I looked for a career that allowed me to combine my passion with technology and computer science with affecting something in the real world: Strategy Consulting.’ ‘There’s one big theme in my life: Curiosity, like a child. That’s the big driver that gives me energy and drives me forward, so I don’t repeat things and am open to new things and new developments.’ ‘Thinking about impact from day one, and embedding that impact into how you run your consulting project, I think that makes a difference.’ ‘When you look at what makes InsurTech business successful, it’s one of two kinds of business: 1) those who are looking are actually working on an inefficiency in a market and launch something that improves that by a large factor, 2) platform business models, a technology-driven business model that rents market access to customers like Amazon.’ ABOUT THE GUEST Prior to joining Oliver Wyman, Dietmar worked at the Boston Consulting Group in Munich and New York, where he led major strategy, IT, and operations projects across a range of industries. Before working in management consulting, Dietmar held a number of technology roles in IT project management, system integration, sales, and education. Dietmar graduated from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) with a diploma and a PhD in computer science with honours and from the University of Hagen with a diploma in business administration. ABOUT THE HOST Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and trust. On Scouting for Growth, she decodes how real growth happens—where capital, collaboration, and courage meet. If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights. And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at [email protected]

On this episode, Sabine VdL interviews Tanguy Touffut, founder and CEO of Descartes Underwriting, a top of its space InsurTech company which is recognized as a top-grade growth venture in its category, parametric insurance. It recently raised $120 million in series B funding with the likes of Mundi Ventures, BlackFin, Cathay Innovation to name but a few. KEY TAKEAWAYS After graduating I really wanted to launch a company shares Tanguy, but lacked some of the skills and I wanted to increase my purchasing power, so I started in the corporate world. There are plenty of benefits when working for a large corporation: the resources, expertise, strong colleagues and you have less skin in the game. But the scope of things you can do as a startup is much wider. The venture capital market is quite bullish about the insurance industry, even if the valuations are decreasing. There’s lots of capital available and you can have a long-term view, compared to large groups who have a short-term view on profitability. There’s a lot of confusion about parametric insurance. It’s not a line of business or a product, it’s an approach to improve product features. It’s the result of years of frustration about insurance that opened up new ways of thinking within the corporate realm. Customers are poorly served in this space and the economics don’t work that well and there’s a lack of transparency, which was increased by the Covid-19 pandemic. "Parametric" has become a way to address these challenges by offering better product features to customers and improving the insurers' trust by making things more true, and more transparent. When you launch your own company with your co-founders, the team is the most important part of the equation: The most precious asset. You need to convince enough people to believe in you in order to build the best team that works well together. The first years aren’t that easy, you have to work extremely hard and be able to step back and criticize your own way of working. This is something you can’t achieve if you aren’t motivated and resilient, or able to take hits. But you always need to be surrounded by the right minds, energies, and beliefs. Brokers are definitely dominant in the corporate sector. They are very useful for clients to understand how insurance for corporates works. This is why we only want to work and ally ourselves with brokers for them to better serve their clientele. I believe that every link of the insurance value chain will be disrupted in the next 5-10 years. Think banking un-bundling and re-bundling! This is happening to us too right now. Some companies are going direct to consumers or corporates with their strategy (don't be fooled). At Descartes Underwriting, we think this is a mistake... BEST MOMENTS ‘Working as an insurer in the sector of natural catastrophes and climate change is extremely rewarding.’ ‘As a corporate employee, I used to use data to model the risk and process payments. Looking at wildfires – which is one of the fastest-growing risks in the world today due to climate change – we use AI neural networks to understand the locations and figure out how badly damaged the locations we analyzed were.’ ‘Parametric covers can be based on the number of casualties, the number of shops that must be closed in a specific location due to a lockdown, and much more. Still, the goal is to use parameters to make people whole faster.’ ‘There are plenty of conventions within the insurance sector. Most of all, insurance has a good reason to exist. Still, the industry was created 338 years ago. As an entrepreneur, you must evaluate and identify the rules that make no sense at all, break them and rebuild them better.’ ABOUT THE GUEST Tanguy Touffut was the CEO of AXA Global Parametrics and Head of Security & Agriculture where he worked for 8 years before becoming an entrepreneur. In 2019, Tanguy set up Descartes Underwriting, an InsurTech and MGA working with brokers with offices in New York, Houston, Denver, London, Paris, Singapore and Sydney. Descartes collaborates with brokers across the world to protect their corporate clients & governments against natural catastrophes, weather, and emerging risks, through a unique data-driven approach. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tanguy-touffut-584b202/?originalSubdomain=fr ABOUT THE HOST Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and trust. On Scouting for Growth, she decodes how real growth happens—where capital, collaboration, and courage meet. If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights. And if yo

On this episode, Sabine VdL interviews David King, Co-Founder and Chief Commercial Officer of fast-growing InsurTech startup, Artificial Labs or Artificial.io to discuss the company's strengths and how sport influences David's choices and business outlook. KEY TAKEAWAYS Artificial is focused on facilitating algorithmic underwriting in the insurance sector. That means the Artificial team works with brokers and underwriters to get the data into the right format so it can be shared between the two and, once it’s been shared, define the process, pipeline, and fundamentals to improve decision-making and customer experiences and interactions. Insurance is an industry where data AND relationships are really important. We use technology (and algorithms) to help automate the decision-making process. The number of variables a human can take into account to make a decision is between 5 and 7. If you keep adding more to the decision-making process, then the accuracy of models and algorithms starts to decrease. If a business is supported by the right technology, one can make a decision that’s either automated or informed by a detailed, risk-based assessment. This enables human actors who would make key decisions to make the right commercial risk decisions, even if partly automated. It’s not just about the ability to train a model to assess risks to improve your underwriting performance and make it efficient; it is also about the ability to operate within ecosystems. Part of our secret sauce is a domain-specific programming language that allows us to codify an underwriter’s appetite and leverage and integrate with any data source or service to make a decision. More data will be available in the future. It is a fact. Are underwriters going to have to be more sophisticated in the way they make decisions? Definitely. Is the market going to become more efficient, and therefore, does the operational cost ratio need to be lower? Even more... Yes. I think underwriters will need to work closely with portfolio managers, people with more maths skills – I don’t necessarily think that means machine learning/ data scientist type skills will become closer to the underwriting decisions on a day-to-day basis, but I do think that you may have a multi-disciplinary team that understands where the data is coming from and what’s driving true decisions. BEST MOMENTS ‘I’ve always been quite competitive and love "sport." I like team sports probably because my own abilities are quite poor. If you’re a team player, you can leverage the abilities of other people, and I look to elite sport to understand what cultures drive performance and how people operate too.’ ‘Technology won’t take over and make all the decisions. Still, you’ll have strategies that are set by very data-informed people, and you can execute that across a broad spectrum of products, services, and classes.’ ‘The models are only as good as the data you provide to them, but the models don’t exist in isolation; they also exist in a business that needs to be operationally efficient.’ ‘You now need to operate while understanding that you’re not going to have all the components end-to-end, so you need to be able to play nicely with others. This will lead to greater efficiency, providing a better experience for customers. This also means you keep them longer and can then sell them more things.’ ABOUT THE GUEST David King has worked in digital media and technology since graduating from Nottingham University Business School with a degree in Industrial Economics in 2005. After a gap year as a troop commander in the British Army, King worked as a Digital Planner at Carat, where he worked with global brands such as Yahoo!, British Gas, and Santander. King moved on to become Director at Sure Insurance Services in 2009, where his knowledge of the digital space helped to bring innovative insurance products to market in the medical and health insurance sectors. It was here that his understanding of the insurance market grew, setting the stage for his later foray into space with Artificial Labs. Following his time at Sure, King founded his own digital services company, Data Stripes, in 2011. The company delivered highly polished, data-intensive, digital applications for some of the world's biggest brands. In 2013, the success of Data Stripes led King to merge with Johnny Bridges' company, ConceptMill, to create Artificial Labs. The company provided high-quality, data-led design to global clients such as BMW, Levi's, and Betfair. In 2016, Artificial pivoted into the insurance space, building partnerships with firms such as AXIS and Ambris. King's existing industry experience, combined with Bridges' previous work in insurance companies, enabled the company to capitalize on a growing need for high-quality data and digital platforms within the insurance industry. Since 2017, King has been steering the commercial ship at Artificial, helping to develop partnerships with global insurance brands such as Co

On this episode, Sabine VdL interviews Nick Pester. Sabine has known Nick for over 4 years. They met when Nick showed a strong interest in the tech startups accepted into Sabine’s accelerator programs and was willing to mentor them with his advice while he was leading the Financial Services, Insurance & InsurTech practices at Capital Law. Nick moved from legal advice within a legal firm to becoming the group general of one of the leading InsurTech growth ventures in the UK. He is also an Advisor to the Chartered Insurance Institute and the Centre for Data Ethics & Innovation on Digital Ethics and the use of Artificial Intelligence in Insurance. On this podcast, they catch up to understand what the past 4 years have brought to him in terms of lessons learnt. KEY TAKEAWAYS I fell into insurance. The firm I applied to for a training contract was a media and entertainment specialist, which was something I was interested in at the time – advising big bands on tour around the world! But they had a really strong insurance practice, and I really enjoyed the fact that there was a dual-layer to all the legal aspects we dealt with: The insurance layer and the underlying subject matter. My day tends to be partnership-focused; there’s always something going on in the partnership front. There are claims to deal with, but otherwise it’s running around responding to the fires as and when they arise, dealing with them as best you can, and trying to have the headspace to look more than a week or a month ahead and think strongly about the strategy of the legal function and the wider business. Law firms and some other businesses tend to be far too fixated on the granularity of academics and qualifications. Of course, you need to be qualified, but actually, what turns a good lawyer into a really great lawyer is personality and character. People who can roll with the punches, take something on the chin, and move on, most importantly for lawyers, people who can accept being wrong. I don’t think lawyers as a profession are very good at admitting when they’re wrong, but in a startup environment, you need to be prepared to make mistakes; it’s part and parcel of learning. One of the biggest challenges in the insurance market with respect to data and its use is ensuring transparency and fairness, while balancing commercial interests and protecting sensitive information. The most obvious example of this is pricing. The balance between using data to improve our products and services, and to drive greater revenue and growth, against how much customers want to know about them. With AI, it’s a very difficult area in the context of regulated activities, because you need to have explainability, why someone has been priced in a certain way. It’s going to be very difficult to build a genuinely self-managing, machine-learning-intuitive system with the necessary explainability and insight that goes with it. BEST MOMENTS ‘I like flying by the seat of my pants. I like a challenge, I like disruption, I’m very passionate about trying to improve things within the sphere of influence that I have in the legal and tech areas.’ ‘Bringing a commercial eye to partnerships is incredibly important as a lawyer in-house.’ ‘To build a sustainable growth venture, you need three things: A very clear mission of what you’re trying to solve/address, spend money on getting the best people, and focus on one thing/the key offering before moving on to something else.’ ‘The trends I’m seeing are a greater focus on existing portfolio companies and investors looking after their existing stock. Lots of aggressive investment in already trading, sustainable businesses. People are finding it harder in Seed capital, which has been a bigger challenge in the last 18 months.’ ABOUT THE GUEST Nick Pester was responsible for the Legal and Compliance functions at Wheely, a luxury ride-hailing service offering on-demand professional chauffeuring at the touch of a button. He then decided to go solo and launched Beyond Legal to work closely with the founders of tech startups. Previously, he has been responsible for the Legal & Regulatory functions at the Zego Group, a market-leading InsurTech business focused on commercial motor, where he oversaw a period of growth from 80 to 600 employees, during which the business achieved unicorn status and completed a $150m Series C fundraise in early 2021. Prior to that, he was Head of the Financial Services & FinTech practices at Capital Law, providing a more niche/specialist offering, grounded in a highly commercial approach. As well, he was Advisor to the Chartered Insurance Institute and the Centre for Data Ethics & Innovation on Digital Ethics and the use of Artificial Intelligence in Insurance, and also acted as an advisor and mentor to a number of individual FinTech & InsurTech businesses in the past, as well as wider accelerator/incubator programmes. ABOUT THE HOST Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned

On this episode, Sabine VdL interviews Sid Chakravarthy, founder and CEO of StaTwig and a leading expert in emerging technology, including the Internet of Things, Blockchain, Metaverse, and NFTs. Sid uses these to develop solutions with large-scale social impact. KEY TAKEAWAYS There are big problems with drugs and vaccines when you look at the last-mile delivery system, or indeed getting to the people who really need them. They get damaged, spoiled, or stolen to be sold on black markets, so I thought I could use my ‘Bay-area skills’ to solve real-world problems, and that’s how I started the company. Supply chains are complex networks of partners who work together to bring a product to the final consumer. But there’s a lot of confusion and a lack of interoperability when it comes to sharing information. They all track the product as it passes through their own company, but it stops when they pass it on to the next partner. We provide end-to-end visibility into how the product moves through the supply chain, leveraging blockchain. The data this technology provides is scalable; underwriters can use it to assess risks across the supply chain: how much product is being damaged? How do I write a policy for that? You can prevent specific claims from happening because you have full transparent visibility of key data points. And those show that there could be a failure in one part of the supply chain or another. The Metaverse and NFTs are not that complex at all. Think of a gamer: he is involved in, and essentially lives in, a full-time game, talking to people, buying and selling things, etc. Scale that up to non-gamers, imagine an alternate world where people can plug in and do what they want: shopping, clubbing, travel, building a home, anything. The possibilities are endless. That’s the Metaverse, a digital reality where you can plug in anytime and live fully in it. NFTs are certificates of ownership for digital art. 500 million people might have that digital art on their laptop, but there’s only one certificate that says “this is the actual owner of it and all the copies”. Think about your Picasso or Rembrandt. Can you prevent the copies? No, but you may be able to in the future with NFTs! This gives you the right to use, sell, brand, and rent that product (digitally) for any commercial purpose. Consider using your digital art and assets in the Metaverse. BEST MOMENTS ‘When I started the company, vaccines were a very boring product, Covid made it very attractive all of a sudden! But by then, we already had a solution to solve some big problems with Covid.’ ‘Internet access and blockchain technology have allowed the birth of a new kind of transparency and visibility. This could never have been done as easily before. And this is because the customer is asking for it.’ ‘Once the product moves from one touch point to another ("airport to courier" or "from manufacturer to consumer") we are annotating the journey and telling the story of it as it moves along its path transparently. Each item has its own tracking number and lots of tracking data about each individual product within each container.’ ‘NFTs can act as a way of bringing your real-world products into the Metaverse by using what is called a true certificate of ownership, allowing you to transact digitally within the new internet.’ ABOUT THE GUEST StatWig is a platform that ensures the safe, high-quality supply of vaccines. The platform provides continuous visibility and actionable insights to enable real-time decision-making. Sid is a leader in emerging technologies, including the Internet of Things (IoT) and Blockchain. He uses these technologies to develop solutions with large-scale social impact across the world's supply chains. Sid launched StatWig 6 years ago to record the journey of products across supply chains from manufacturer to customer to create an extra layer of visibility, transparency, and authenticity. The team has worked with customers such as UNICEF, Gavi, NASDAQ, and the World Economic Forum, among others. Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sidchakravarthy/ Email: [email protected] Website: https://statwig.com/ & https://www.linkedin.com/company/statwig/ ABOUT THE HOST Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and trust. On Scouting for Growth, she decodes how real growth happens—where capital, collaboration, and courage meet. If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights. And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at [email protected]

On this episode, Sabine VdL interviews Tobias Taupitz, CEO and Co-Founder of Laka, to discuss topics including business model innovation, leadership, culture, and expansion into new markets. KEY TAKEAWAYS Why should you protect future losses when you can look backwards knowing exactly how much you need to charge to cover your costs of claims? We do so retroactively shares Tobi, so as not to incur a credit risk or payment default risk. It is all about balancing the risk, including actuarial risk. This way we know down to the penny how much we need to recover in a month, we can be fully transparent because we’re a high frequency, and a low margin player. Customers get a monthly breakdown from us showing what happened within their risk pool of like-minded people, and we split the costs among them. We have a cost-plus business model in insurance where we add a fee on top of every claim we settle – a success fee almost – so, ironically, the more claims we settle the more money we make. The Laka model, or whatever it will be called eventually – a credit-based insurance proposition – should be the status quo across the industry because it’s the only way in my mind that it’s a fair and appealing to customers. It will change the game. In a world where brand trust is at an all-time low and traditional insurers have commoditised themselves to the point of no return (thanks to the price comparison websites for example,) the next big buzzwords such as ‘embedded insurance' do not help create brand awareness. Such buzzwords become more and more interchangeable. We’re trying to build an insurance brand people can trust, that they want to associate themselves with, which allows us to do cool things like horizontal cross-selling, a ‘colour-in’ health product which is a modern take on personal accident cover and vertical expansion. To all founders: You’re not alone, there are many great people out there willing to help, but it’s up to you to express what you need and how you would like to work together. Be radical and say “no” to advice that doesn’t fit in because you’re the only person that knows your business, the way you do. Nevertheless, highly stimulating viewpoints (as always) are always great to listen to and learn from. BEST MOMENTS ‘Why estimate when you can be accurate?’ ‘Laka is the divine goddess of prosperity and hula dancing – we saw this a very fitting comparison about well-being and having some fun.’ ‘We want to be the lifestyle brand within the mobility insurance.’ ‘With 125 million active cyclists with a high-end or insurable bike in a growing market is a fantastic place to be. In England alone, 47% of people aged 5 and over owned or had access to a bicycle in 2020. If you focus efficiently, you can own the full supply chain from front to end. That’s what we’re building with modes around sustainable mobility in Europe.’ ABOUT THE GUEST Tobias Taupitz’s aim is to turn a century-old insurance operating model on its head. He launched Laka with his two co-founders after spending years in the Corporate Finance teams at Barclays and KPMG, covering financial technology and insurance clients. Rediscovering his passion for insurance, he made it his mission to align customer and insurer interests, moving from premiums upfront to payments in arrears. Tobias graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Insurance and Actuarial Sciences from the Cologne University of Applied Sciences and attended University College Dublin and the National University of Singapore to earn his CEMS Master’s in International Management degree. ABOUT THE HOST Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and trust. On Scouting for Growth, she decodes how real growth happens—where capital, collaboration, and courage meet. If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights. And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at [email protected]

On this episode, Sabine VdL interviews Allison or Ally Schneider who heads up venture partnerships at Vouch, a US business insurance platform for startups. Vouch raised over $160 million in investment funding so far with well-renowned investors including Silicon Valley Bank, Index Ventures and Y Combinator. Ally talks to Sabine about the company’s business model and helps us understand how Vouch helps founders like you grow and scale in the right way. KEY TAKEAWAYS The product and experience have been very manual; we’ve been able to build a digital-first experience for founders to obtain business insurance. They can apply through our site in 7-10 minutes through our questionnaire, which asks specific questions about their business that give them a customised quote in terms of what coverage and limits we recommend, and they can adjust those parameters to suit them, and their coverage will go live at midnight on the same day. This not only reduces the time for startup founders but also provides a very easy self-service experience for those who prefer it. When you think of legacy risk classification systems, they tend to be very broad and vague. We break it down into 70 niche codes (from connected home devices to B2B SaaS, AI/machine learning) to get really granular and customised to the customer's needs across different types of companies. That goes into our underwriting algorithm to say these are the coverages that make the most sense for your business today, as well as the ones you might want to consider as the business grows and scales in the future. We have 10 proprietary lines of covers. We’re in the process of becoming a full carrier, which gives us a lot more flexibility to go direct-to-consumers, to do more from a discounting and bundling perspective, to be more flexible with timing, and to put coverage in place and bind the risk quickly. We also take a really proactive approach to risk management as well. A founder has so many responsibilities to their business and people, too. There are things that founders are incredible at, and having business insurance expertise typically isn’t one of them – and nor should it. We think about our role in how we can make this process as painless, easy, cost-effective, and high-quality, as we should be able to save these founders time and energy so that they can focus their time and effort on the things that are really important to their business BEST MOMENTS ‘The energy that you get spending your days surrounded by the most amazing entrepreneurs and founders, talking with them through the most interesting problems that they’re solving: That doesn’t get old.’ ‘I get asked if I’m a corporate or a startup person, I actually really enjoy both environments as long as I can collaborate with the other.’ ‘When business insurance matters, it really matters. It’s an area where it’s of high importance but low awareness. We saw the opportunity to build really innovative products and services that are really geared towards these types of companies, as we really want to fill that education gap too: or why business insurance is really important for founders.’ ‘Our insurance advisors’ expertise sets us apart in terms of how we engage with our customers or the startup founders effectively and directly. They understand the inner workings of how startups operate and what it means to be an eCommerce business vs a SaaS business... the milestones those companies go through and the risks they face.’ ABOUT THE GUEST Allison Schneider is heading Venture Ecosystem Partnership at Vouch Insurance. She is relatively new to the InsurTech world with a background in corporate and startup collaborations. She started her career at IBM Watson through IBM's startup partnership programme, supporting startups building on IBM’s AI and machine learning APIs, providing the technology, support, and resources they needed to grow. Through that role, Alli fell in love with AI and machine learning, technology in general, and the possibilities and use cases for these technologies. After IBM, she spent some time at a venture-backed startup called x.ai, building out its sales and business development practice and working with corporates on the other side of the table. She then went back into corporate, working at Principal, E*TRADE Ventures, and Labs, leading the startup mission there while engaging with and building bridges to FinTech and enterprise tech startups, shaping proof of concepts, prototypes, and commercial pilots. ABOUT THE HOST Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and trust. On Scouting for Growth, she decodes how real growth happens—wher

On this episode, Sabine VdL interviews Roman Rittweger, founder and CEO of Ottonova – a digital health insurance provider for individual patients and self-employed people. Today, seven+ years after it was started, Ottonova has over 100 employees and has deployed a marketplace (or an end-to-end platform) that helps users register for and access health insurance coverage for medical services. By 2022, the team had raised over $145 million in Series E. Some of its investors include great names such as Early Bird Venture Capital and Seven Ventures. KEY TAKEAWAYS Health insurance is one of the most complicated types of insurance to build. People asked me why I wanted to do this, build a HealthTech InsurTech, and why I wouldn’t just want to be a service provider for a health insurance company. My answer is that I had already been a service provider, and I didn’t enjoy it much because you can’t steer the business your way. I wanted to be able to design the tariff, be the customer’s partner, make the sale at the very beginning of the engagement, manage the customer, make them really happy, and save costs at the end for all the parties involved. To do this, you need to have the whole package. We work in two ecosystems: the insurance ecosystem, where we are the most modern player in Germany, and the financial services ecosystem, where we have the highest net promoter score (67, where the number two has 34). At the same time, we sell our software in Germany and get into other areas and other ecosystems, like life insurance, where we’re starting to sell products and software to other health insurance providers. I definitely see that the lines between health and wellness are blurring. We have created a HealthX Club where, in exchange for participating in our market research, we give our users bonus points to spend on their Apple Watch, fitness club, meditation app, etc. The German customers are insured with us, and we want them to stay healthy. Also, we’re starting to work with partners in the fitness field, and even in cosmetics and dental as we figure out if we can add an insurance part to their product. As we’re digital and relatively agile, it’s very easy for us to build that for them. Our VCs were very shocked by the amount of regulation and the number of people we had to bring on board to become compliant and obtain our insurance licence. They were also shocked by the amount of money we had to invest. After a while, we began looking for other ways to bring financing into the company. We had to go via new routes, including refinancing. Note that German investment leaders are not tech-savvy, so they invested with us to learn from us. We know that corporate venturing (or the stage where corporates want to partner and invest) will always be there for companies like ours because it is part of the stages of any industry-led startup growth process. BEST MOMENTS ‘I had to wait for the right time and have a little bit of luck as well to start Ottonova. This took me 10 years.’ ‘Finding the right customer was the only easy part!’ ‘We ask our customers what they want because what you think they might want isn’t what’s important for them. Here is an example: rather than getting medicine delivered by drone before they need it, they’d prefer bills to be paid within 24 hours rather than 48 hours. Understanding such nuances is truly understanding your customers' needs.’ ‘In our case, our direct chat and the service we provide day-to-day is actually much more important for our customers than the ‘sexy’ telemedicine engagement platform we created – we haven’t seen a big uptake in that for instance yet.’ ABOUT THE GUEST Roman Rittweger is a doctor by training, though he didn’t practice medicine for long. He worked as a consultant at the macro level of healthcare and insurance, focusing on the customer and how to provide a better experience for them, and on making it more affordable by steering customers towards the right kind of medical care. His first startup was a medical provider for health insurance, helping the insured population find the right physician or manage their chronic diseases. He sold this company to Germany’s largest private health insurer at the time and became a consultant again. He learned about marketing and sales because he’d realised through his experience that this is the most important thing. He eventually began looking for the next big area where he could start more startups, and six years ago, he sold his consultancy and jumped into the world of digital health insurance, founding Ottonova. ABOUT THE HOST Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and

On this episode, Sabine VdL interviews Steven Mendel, CEO and Co-Founder of Bought By Many, an InsurTech startup well known across the UK market, with a new brand launched in the US under the name "ManyPets." Bought By Many is making the world a better place for pet parents through its tech-enabled insurance products and services. KEY TAKEAWAYS The first startup I was involved with was in the investment consulting space in the mid-90s. I became a management consultant and went on to set up three more startups, all in the finance space, but none of them directly related to insurance. Bought By Many started in the broader insurance space, but over several years, we narrowed our focus to the pet space. For many years I’d been troubled by the poor way large corporates treat individuals – in particular in financial services – in contrast, they treat other corporates very, very well. I felt I had to do something to redress the balance between corporates and individuals in financial services. We asked our pet community members to fill out a questionnaire to understand what they thought of the insurance industry, how they would have improved it, and what their ideal pet insurance policy would look like. We got 40,000 responses and created seven brand-new go-to-market products in September 2016. Instead of going live, we took the opportunity to reimagine every step of the customer's insurance journey so that, when we launched in February 2017, there was nothing about the experience that bore any relation to anything else they would have seen in the pet space before. We became a double unicorn in eight and three-quarters years. But, in truth, I can’t get excited about the valuation at all. It doesn’t change in any way the business, the people we want to recruit, our existing staff, our focus on our customer base, our focus on the pets, or our focus on the pet parents. It’s an important milestone, of course, but it has not changed us as a business one single piece of the way. BEST MOMENTS ‘Our first TV advert was at the very beginning on direct to household advertising, and we were able to work with Ridley Scott’s production studio to create something genuinely different and quirky.’ ‘The idea behind Bought By Many was creating communities of individuals who had similar but niche insurance needs and to help them get access to better insurance – price, product, and customer experience.’ ‘Our Net Promoter Score has never been below 70.’ ‘Pet owners do talk, they want to know what pet food you use, what vet you go to, and who insures your pet. Having members of ours who advocate in the marketplace is really important for us and has massive knock-on economic benefits, of course.’ ABOUT THE GUEST Steven Mendel has over 25 years of experience as an actuary in financial services, which has included leading Close Brothers Wealth Management during the launch of their non-advised offering, creating the world’s first art-focused wealth advice offering for Christie’s, working as part of the team that formed Barclays Wealth, and heading the McKinsey UK Savings and Investment Group. Steven founded Bought By Many, now called ManyPets, which is disrupting the pet insurance market through innovative tech and is building a business to become an irresistible employer obsessed with customer service. In April 2019, Steven was included in the London Business School Review of 30 People Who Are Changing The World. ABOUT THE HOST Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and trust. On Scouting for Growth, she decodes how real growth happens—where capital, collaboration, and courage meet. If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights. And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at [email protected]

On this episode, Sabine VdL interviews Helene Panzarino, author of Reinventing Banking and Finance: A Framework to Navigate Global FinTech Innovation, published on Amazon in November 2020. The pair discusses the book and the key insight Helene offers for reinventing the banking business model. KEY TAKEAWAYS We assume banking has always been what it is today. In the early days (1200s Italy) hyper-personalisation was going on for aristocrats and the like, now FinTech is the full circle back to hyper-personalisation but we’re doing it at scale, digitally. The Industrial Revolution had a significant impact on banking, as it did on every other aspect of society and the economy. There’s now mass servicing, which has taken away some of the personalisation and individuality of banking. This intensified through the IT side of banking in the 1950s, when we were able to use technology to store and process more data, as well as to begin offering more products and services to a wider audience. The more recent digital revolution and the internet allowed us to do our banking online, and the smartphone brought that to its apex, so you have a bank in your pocket. In five years’ time, we’ll be able to DIY our own bank and choose between different products and services; this is where FinTech will come into its own. It took banking ages to realise that the threat posed by the insurance industry from outside was greater than the threat from within. Insurance and InsurTechs had a much better collaborative partnership from the get-go, whereas banks and FinTechs were adversaries. FinTechs have now grown up and are aware that they need their parents if they’re going to scale, and they’re working very well collaboratively now, but I applaud the insurance industry for getting there first. BEST MOMENTS ‘Everyone must now have a global view; no one can stay confined in his/her geographical space.’ ‘The pandemic has shown us the inadequacies of some banks’ desktops, platforms, and apps. Consumers are now using those apps, including the non-digital natives who used to visit banking branches in person and weren’t used to digital engagements.’ ‘If you’ve created a startup bank, you need to remember that you’re operating In a regulated industry and if you ‘colour outside of the lines’ the regulator is going to come down on you. So, make sure to bring in experienced people to your C-Suite or Board.’ ‘Everyone knows how to innovate, but everyone does not know how to execute. You need to be given space and the finances to fail. It needs to be OK and not damaging to your growth path or career prospects if you’re going to fail, too. Acceptance of different growth paths needs to be accepted from the top; if that openness doesn’t permeate from the top down, then nobody’s going to try to grow smartly or differently.’ ABOUT THE GUEST Originally a Commercial Banker, Helene is an experienced FinTech Programme Director, an exited entrepreneur, educator, and author. Her book ‘Reinventing Banking and Finance: Frameworks to navigate global FinTech innovation’ came out in Sept 2020. Previously, the MD of the global Rainmaking Colab FinTech Programme, a world-first, post-accelerator program for Series A+ FinTechs and Tier 1 financial institutions, Helene was also responsible for the Inaugural Programme of Education and Events for Innovate Finance. She is an Associate Director of the LIBF Digital Banking Centre, the Lead Fellow, and creator of a world-first FinTech Pathway in a Master's in Tech Entrepreneurship Degree for UCL, and co-creator and lead delivery partner on the Imperial College FinTech Executive Education Programme. Her specialist subject areas are Digital Banking and Alternative Finance (SMEs). She is also the CEO of the New Financial Laborator,y enabling community banks and building societies to engage with the global FinTech community. A regular judge, speaker, and moderator for the banking and FinTech awards and conferences, Helene was a BSI FinTech representative for the UK in Brussels, named on the Computer Weekly 100 Women in Tech Award 2018-19, and on the Innovate Finance Women in FinTech Power List for 2019. You can discover more about Helene's book here > reinventing banking and finance. ABOUT THE HOST Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and trust. On Scouting for Growth, she decodes how real growth happens—where capital, collaboration, and courage meet. If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights. And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at [email protected]

On this episode, Sabine VdL interviews Spiros Margaris, who discusses the pros and cons of working for a young venture, setting up a startup, as well as the best way to succeed in business. He shares insights on the future of FinTech and much more. KEY TAKEAWAYS You build trust with founders by telling them what you think, honestly, but not always expecting them to do what you say. Trust is the basis of working together, and with trust, anyone can go far, even in difficult times. You have to play to your strengths. If somebody asks you questions – and startups will – and you don’t know the answer, you need to say you don’t know. But then call someone in your network who has expertise and can answer. A startup engagement is like any "relationship": you will have great times, mediocre times, and bad times. It won’t always be this exciting thing people think of. Even if the job you do is extremely boring and repetitive, whichever job that is, that’s what will make you good at that job long term. The future of FinTech is embedded finance. Even non-financial companies will enter this space with trusted partners or develop their own FinTech solutions, which will complement their existing offerings even better. They don’t need to make money through finance, unlike banks. The finance ‘cake’ will be split into more categories in the future, including financial and non-financial offers. BEST MOMENTS ‘It’s a privilege to be recognised by your community, but at the end of the day, you’re only as good as your community. We grow together.’ ‘Winning is about teamwork: Together we win, like a football team.’ ‘Great young people want to work in great companies that give them responsibilities and let their voice be heard. They’re not so bothered about money yet. They want purpose.’ ‘The nice thing about my job is that I talk to so many smart people. This means that I keep learning. Think about our world as a fantastic international digital school!’ ABOUT THE GUEST Spiros Margaris is a venture capitalist, futurist, keynote speaker and senior advisor. He is the first international influencer to achieve ‘The Triple Crown’ FinTech ranking. He was ranked the international № 1 FinTech, Blockchain, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) influencer (05/2018) by Onalytica. Spiros once again was ranked the global № 1 Fintech influencer (02/2020) by Onalytica. He regularly ranks among the top three in established global industry influencer rankings. He is a keynote speaker at international FinTech and InsurTech conferences. He also gave a TEDxAcademy Talk. He published an AI white paper, “Machine learning in financial services: Changing the rules of the game,” for the enterprise software vendor SAP. First non-IBM Keynote Speaker at the biggest IBM event in Europe, “2019 IBM Systems Technical University”, among others. Linkedin link: https://www.linkedin.com/in/spirosmargaris/ Twitter Link: https://twitter.com/SpirosMargaris Website Link: https://www.margarisventures.com/ Keynote Speaking Agent: www.gspeakers.com ABOUT THE HOST Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and trust. On Scouting for Growth, she decodes how real growth happens—where capital, collaboration, and courage meet. If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights. And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at [email protected]

On this episode, Sabine VdL reviews the four types of investment and who is winning the corporate venturing game as well as looking to the future to evaluate and imagine what is coming our way. KEY TAKEAWAYS The four types of investment strategies: ‘Driving’ (strategic and tightly linked to operational capabilities), ‘Enabling’ (strategic and loosely liked to operational capabilities), ‘Emerging’ (tightly linked to metrics of financial importance), and ‘Passive’ (loosest connected to corporate capabilities and strategies). Winners at corporate venturing during the ‘Startup Phase’ have been identified as having 3 core elements: A clear and defined vision that drives a clear charter and operating model; A strong and experienced team that combines both internal operational knowledge and external understanding of the Venture Capitalist’s drivers; Established expectations and milestones to measure and ensure performance. Winners in corporate venturing during the ‘Expansion Phase’ are seen to have a slightly different set of core components: Agility in refining strategic investments or the portfolio focus; Tailored approaches to recruiting and retaining the Corporate Venturing team over time; Institutionalization of the Corporate Venturing operating platform. Winners during the “Resiliency Phase” have found ways to industrialize and democratize their learnings. They have been identified as having the following common characteristics: The Corporate Venturing program plays a strategic role and continually influences parent growth; there are purpose-built, well-established, end-to-end investment platforms; and they have intelligent community management and communications capabilities. BEST MOMENTS 'Consider Driving and Enabling investment paths at the earliest stage of formation, moving to Emergent investment. This means that Passive investment in the latter stages of the CVC model is probably the best option to drive long-term financial returns.’ ‘CSAA Insurance Group, for instance, provides insurance products across a range of personal areas to AAA members as they built their own Corporate Venturing arm.’ ‘Having an agile platform is crucial.’ ‘Innovations are creating seismic scale changes to our business landscape across multiple big industries. These evolutions and changes are made possible through corporate venturing.’ ABOUT THE HOST Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and trust. On Scouting for Growth, she decodes how real growth happens—where capital, collaboration, and courage meet. If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights. And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at [email protected]

On this episode, Sabine VdL interviews Sam Evans, a Founding Partner with Eos Venture Partners, who has spent the last four years investing in InsurTech startups. He is an active speaker and a top 50 InsurTech influencer. Prior to establishing Eos, Sam was a partner at KPMG, where he led the Global Deal Advisory insurance practice. During his career, Sam has worked on over $75bn of insurance-related transactions and has worked in many of the large, mature, and high-growth insurance markets around the globe. Sam lived in great places, including Australia, Hong Kong, and Switzerland. Today, Sam lives in the UK. KEY TAKEAWAYS There’s so much happening, it’s a super exciting time. One of the key areas for us at Eos is the digital and gig economies. First, it’s difficult to properly serve the gig economy worker with traditional insurance solutions because they’re not usage-based, not connected, and often backwards-looking. Still, the gig economy worker has become a huge and growing market, especially on the back of the pandemic. It’s also underserved. Second, the ability to transition from protection to prevention within life and health, leveraging technology to proactively manage risk and embed medical, health, and fitness technologies to prevent the deterioration of conditions. Third, consider emerging risk classes, such as cybersecurity risk, combined with embedded insurance mechanisms; these new risk classes are increasingly entering the market. The pandemic has accelerated the industry’s adoption of ‘digital’ by at least 5 years, which is quite staggering. Demand from pretty much all our portfolio companies has increased significantly, so we’re seeing it in real-time. The industry’s maturity has also accelerated; overall fundraising levels are increasing, but they’re increasingly dominated by a smaller number of companies making larger rounds. The first half of 2021 saw more funding than the whole of 2020, so we’re still on a very significant upwards trajectory in terms of appetite and capital flowing in. We are in an environment with inflated valuations, too. The InsurTech bubble hasn’t burst yet. It’s deflating, though, and this may not necessarily be a bad thing. It’s all part of the maturing journey of a sector. There’s a significant amount of capital looking to be deployed against excellent business models. We’re always keen to talk to companies that are either on the path to or have reached the series A stage. If you look at the market as a whole, we’re at least 10 years behind FinTech in development, so we’re still at a very early stage of development. This is going to dominate the industry for the next 20-30 years. This is a fundamental change and shift in how insurance operates. BEST MOMENTS ‘Key to our philosophy is working in partnership with the industry, rather than adopting a pure challenger model, which is where we saw the greatest value could be created.’ ‘Connected vehicle insurance enhances safety by improving driving quality and highlighting accident hotspots. Insurers today get better results as they can use the data to enhance risk selection and pricing.’ ‘A lot of InsurTech startups are going to struggle and fail. That’s part of the natural evolution of a sector. I think Covid-19 has accelerated that to a certain degree due to the fight for quality, and the lookout for those startups that are likely to do particularly well.’ ‘Incumbents shouldn’t see regulation as something that’s going to protect them from new entrants. We’ve seen, even in our small portfolio, companies moving from an MGA into a full-stack model with the blessing of the regulator.’ ABOUT THE GUEST Sam Evans is a founding partner of Eos Venture Partners, a Strategic InsurTech Venture Capital fund with offices in London and Philadelphia. Eos is an independent specialist InsurTech investment and advisory business. Eos is today a Series A and Series B investor with a focus on new business models and new technologies that will impact and transform the insurance industry. Eos provides financing and advisory services to leading entrepreneurs building innovative insurance businesses. In partnership with RAW Capital Partners, Eos offers a unique solution for growth-stage InsurTech companies. Founders are choosing to work with Eos because it is an independent specialist and active InsurTech investor with a strong track record and excellent relationships across the insurance sector. ABOUT THE HOST Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and trust. On Scouting for Growth, she decodes how real growth happens—where capital, collaboration, and courage meet. If this episode

On this episode, Sabine VdL interviews Florian Graillot, an investor and co-founder of Astorya.vc or Astorya. Astorya invests in Seed InsurTech startups across Europe. In this conversation, the pair covers topics including who he is, why he started Astorya, and how he sees the world of corporate venturing today and tomorrow. KEY TAKEAWAYS There is a trend emerging of direct competition between Tier 1 insurance players and reinsurance companies working directly with InsurTech startups, enabling them to bypass specific insurance providers across the value chain. The latter has a massive impact on how the market is being restructured behind the scenes. Florian founded Astorya with co-founder Jan Kastory because he saw a market gap. As an investor, Florian shares that Astorya’s focus is investing in entrepreneurs first, utilising his team’s financial and entrepreneurial background. Given this context, it makes sense that Astorya attracts top tech entrepreneurs. At Astorya, Florian states, "We understand how to grow businesses as we do just that ourselves every day." FinTech investors only commit 10% of their time to InsurTech. Astorya only does InsurTech, explains Florian, meaning that 100% of Astorya’s time is dedicated to insurance tech ventures. And this is why Astorya’s limited partners invested in the firm. The Limited Partners know that the Astorya team will spend 100% of its time on the InsurTech topic every single day of the week. Don’t be afraid of what you read in the newspapers. There are still many opportunities to address in InsurTech; not everything has been done yet. The full insurance value chain needs to be unbundled, re-bundled, and revamped, and InsurTech startups can address this in numbers. We already have a few unicorns within the InsurTech space. Don’t forget that technology is a means to an end; without it, succeeding in any industry becomes tougher and tougher. Today, technology becomes your competitive edge over traditional insurance companies. BEST MOMENTS ‘InsurTech is way broader than just insurance. It can be connected to almost any industry.’ ‘Tech investment is in my DNA, insurance is much more opportunistic.’ ‘There’s always somebody who is managing more money than you. It’s not about money, it’s about the industry, focus, understanding, and capacity to accelerate go-to-market strategies, especially around software or B2B technologies.’ ‘It may be very easy to raise money at the very beginning of the startup journey, or when you are big enough to attract a huge round from private equity investors, but when you are in the middle, it’s still challenging. I believe that both entrepreneurs and corporates should keep that in mind.’ ABOUT THE GUEST Florian Graillot is a founding partner and VC investor at Astorya.vc where he invests in early-stage tech startups in Europe. His main focus is to identify, evaluate, and invest in growth ventures that utilise next-generation customer-centric technologies to reinvent insurance. His skills include investment, financial modelling, entrepreneurship, business development, and strategy. http://astorya.vc/ ABOUT THE HOST Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and trust. On Scouting for Growth, she decodes how real growth happens—where capital, collaboration, and courage meet. If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights. And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at [email protected]

In this episode, Sabine VdL is joined by Matthew Jones, Managing Director and venture capital investor in insurance and risk management-related technology for Anthemis in the UK, Europe, and North America. Through his previous work with Swiss Re, Matthew sponsored Sabine’s first accelerator and was one of her most active mentors, engaged assessor, and investor. They both learned a great deal during the acceleration programme about what a sustainable business model meant. KEY TAKEAWAYS At the core of our investment thesis are banks, insurance companies, and FinTech companies. But in addition to those kinds of businesses, we’re also actively researching, exploring, and investing in several adjacent industries where we believe that the technology will intersect with financial services in the future, including energy, agriculture, mobility, health, and property tech. For me, cultivating change means that we’re prepared to back genuinely different and disruptive ideas that others aren’t. Because our team comes from both inside and outside financial services, we try to blend those perspectives to think creatively about how we back new companies and underrepresented founders. In the context of venture, there’s a rule of thumb that startups should aim for a 10x better user experience or a 10x better return on investment. That’s a good rule of thumb. And across financial services, there are so many underdeveloped spots where growth ventures can focus on delivering that kind of outcome. Entrepreneurs who seek funding should seek smart money. They should ask their investors what they believe in and how they put it into practice. They should also evaluate their investment team and partners: Are they a diverse bunch? Do they have values that align with yours, and are they putting them into practice? Would you want to affiliate with a firm that doesn’t share your values? BEST MOMENTS ‘Without insurance and re-insurance, nothing really happens. Insurance is everywhere, which is great for me as someone who’s a little bit obsessive about insurance.’ ‘Financial services are the lifeblood of the world’s economies. But we recognise it’s not perfect and there are opportunities for improvement.’ ‘There is no part of the insurance value chain that is immune to the effect of technology.’ ‘There’s no excuse, and it’s not acceptable, for big venture capital companies to have all male and all white CEO portfolio companies. We are in the 21st Century!’ ABOUT THE GUEST I interviewed Matthew when he was the Managing Director at Anthemis, responsible for sourcing, analyzing, and executing investments, as well as providing support to Anthemis’ portfolio companies. Today, he is the head of business development at MS Transverse He brings in-depth knowledge of the insurance sector and focuses on investments in insurance and risk-related technology. Matthew’s areas of interest include analytics and data, artificial intelligence and automation, asset management, digital health, mobility, new insurance propositions, and risk management. Prior to joining Anthemis, Matthew was at Swiss Re, with roles across non-life, life, and reinsurance in the USA, London, and Europe. Matthew previously served on the boards of Flock, Hokodo, and Stable and is the resident venture investor for Carrier Management’s VC Viewpoint series. He holds a bachelor’s in business administration from the University of Bath and also studied at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. ABOUT THE HOST Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and trust. On Scouting for Growth, she decodes how real growth happens—where capital, collaboration, and courage meet. If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights. And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at [email protected]

In this episode, Sabine VdL defines venture scouting, also called technology scouting, and explains why companies and investors see it as so important. She also discusses what skillsets a technology scout needs to succeed as well as what should motivate them and how these strategies are delivered. KEY TAKEAWAYS In recent months companies around the globe have seen new types of challenges affecting them all, including: changing customer needs (such as the "I want it now" generation demanding reduced engagement friction); rising competition (This does not only means the fast-moving dominance of BigTech, but also the arrival of new digital market entrants.); and increasing market volatility (Think about bitcoins and other digital currencies that have fluctuated up and down). Many companies see it as essential to closely monitor developments in core technologies and scan for emerging technologies with disruptive potential. Methods here include technological forecasting, technology foresight, and technology intelligence. The basis of technology scouting is to enhance insight into emerging and advanced technologies and shorten the time lag between technological advancement and detection, accelerating the potential delivery of unfair competitive advantages for any company. One of the biggest obstacles to innovation is often the regional limitations and the siloed way of thinking that exist in many corporations today. They know, though, that to remain competitive, they need to acquire valuable information on emerging technologies as early as possible. BEST MOMENTS ‘Strong technological competence plays a crucial role in maintaining and improving a company's competitive position, regardless of business size.’ ‘In an environment impacted by technological complexity and the globalization of R&D activities, the successful identification, and usage of external sources of knowledge is becoming increasingly essential and primordial as part of a business success strategy.’ ‘Technology scouts require lateral thinking, knowledge in science and technology, a certain level of credibility, recognition within the company, cross-disciplinary orientation, creativity, and imagination.’ ‘Think about venture/technology scouting as an early warning system for companies to make better innovation choices.’ ABOUT THE HOST Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and trust. On Scouting for Growth, she decodes how real growth happens—where capital, collaboration, and courage meet. If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights. And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at [email protected]

In this episode, Sabine VdL describes what corporate venturing is and what it entails, how it can help startups and entrepreneurs, why there is an increased drive towards corporate venturing today and the best strategies to deploy VC programmes. KEY TAKEAWAYS With corporate venturing, large companies develop, sponsor or invest in startup companies from the earliest stages of formation to later stages of growth to identify emerging technologies and develop cutting-edge customer-driven solutions that can resist the effects of time. The central point is that a startup company is evaluated and then funded by the corporate venture capital arm of the established business. This works well to shake off protocol and bureaucracy which can weigh down innovation when a parent company gets involved in partnership and investment decisions. Venture Capitalists (VCs) are experts at the money side of things where they focus on the financial objectives, whereas the corporate venturing team draws expertise from finance but also from strategy and industry, with their fingers on the pulse of emerging trends, opportunities, and risks. Young startup businesses can benefit tremendously from accessing the distribution, assets, core capabilities including the global resources and infrastructure of the big guns. If those established companies have well-defined processes in place, they can facilitate the education of internal stakeholders alongside startup founders on how best their solutions could scale within one or multiple geographies while providing effective mentorship. They can also find a paved path to access specific customer markets and growth. In industries such as insurance, dominated by large players, this is especially important. BEST MOMENTS ‘Corporate venturing has some similarities to what R&D is in many industries.’ ‘Corporate venturing also has some similarities to Venture Capital funding.’ ‘There will always be some great CVCs and less great CVC units out there.’ ‘80% of startups fail.’ ABOUT THE HOST Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and trust. On Scouting for Growth, she decodes how real growth happens—where capital, collaboration, and courage meet. If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights. And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at [email protected]

I just thought I would explain… Why Scouting for Growth? I have been fortunate to work with Tech ventures over the past six years that are changing the worlds of insurance, finance, health, and wealth, to name but a few. And to accelerate great companies, one needs to understand a little bit about "business." I have been fascinated with building growth ecosystems for the past six years. Getting my ventures to collaborate better and faster. At the same time, I have been driven by the potential of enabling my corporate partners to collaborate better with tech ventures while enabling those growth ventures with the greatest potential to engage with the many investors who gave me their trust. "Scouting For Growth" is the underlying premise for both … Venture Capitalists and Corporate "Venturists!" One side is looking for financial returns mostly from investing in start-up ventures. The other side tries to balance both financial and strategic returns. And often create unnecessary tech bubbles through the process. Anyway, I want to demystify through this podcast series two important processes that yield strong financial outcomes though 1) partnership, 2) investment, but then leading to 3) growth and 4) scale. First, Scouting For Growth is about scouting for ventures: or identifying and nurturing startups that are aligned to major market problems. The outcome sought may mostly be partnerships and collaborations but also longer-term investment opportunities for the many. Second, Scouting For Growth is about building ventures: or creating and designing new customer value propositions supported by disruptive business models able to solve some of the most complex challenges we need to contend with today. Hopefully, the lessons learnt will ensure that we gather the right tools and techniques to build the growth business of tomorrow. You will also find that… I am French. I have been in the UK for 30 years. I am fortunate to work every day with some renowned international companies. But despite my great English I still and often drop my “ses” and count in French. I hope you won’t mind. You can take the French gal out of France. But rarely will you change her truly! ABOUT THE HOST Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and trust. On Scouting for Growth, she decodes how real growth happens—where capital, collaboration, and courage meet. If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights. And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at [email protected]

Hi, I am Sabine VanderLinden – Many of my friends call me Mrs VdL. I have been in business for over 25 years. I worked for highly respected, well-known blue-chip companies. And 6 years ago, I decided to take the entrepreneurial and investor route and ran a very well-known acceleration program for early-stage startups in Europe and the United States, while also engaging with investors and corporations in Asia, Africa, and LATAM. Yes. I know. Five continents in 5 years. 70 startups accelerated during that period. Lots of Airmiles. $100 million invested in accelerated portfolios. And certainly, lots of learning. Since then, my team and I have scouted over 20,000 ventures to help both corporates and investors identify new sources of growth. I want to dedicate this podcast to the founders, entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs, investors, corporate fighters, and change-makers who, over the years, have given me their time, patience, and trust. We will, together, demystify the world of corporate venturing. ABOUT THE HOST Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and trust. On Scouting for Growth, she decodes how real growth happens—where capital, collaboration, and courage meet. If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights. And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at [email protected]