Pier: company operates in the insurance market and has already expanded its business beyond the automobile sector (Germano Lüders / Prime Time Zone)
This report is part of the series “50 startups that change Brazil”, published in EXAME. Meet the other selected companies
More than 100,000 people are waiting in line to purchase Pier smartphone or car insurance. Founded in 2018, the startup expects its customer base to grow 50 times by the end of 2022 to reach 750,000 people. The projection is bold, but realistic. Mainly because the company has enough money to operate.
In November, insurtech raised $ 14.5 million in an investment round led by venture capital fund Monashees. The round also included the participation of Canary, the MELI Fund (from Mercado Livre), and the bank BTG Pactual.
As determined exclusively by EXAME, the company had been meeting monthly with potential investors and the current investment was negotiated for at least six months. The plan is to expand the operation of the company, which had already received another $ 7.6 million in a round in March last year.
Part of the money will be used precisely for the purpose of clearing the queue and expanding services – but without creating other categories, at least for now. Even with money, the company continues to exercise caution – a characteristic known to those who take out insurance.
To reach this level, Pier bet on two pillars. The first is ease. The entire process of hiring and using the second one is done in minutes on the company’s website. “We have already had cases of customers who received a refund in 38 seconds,” says Igor Mascarenhas, co-founder and president of the company.
In addition to Mascarenhas, the business idea is also by Lucas Prado and Rafael Oliveira. The trio met at the State University of Campinas (Unicamp), still in 2006. The idea of setting up a company, however, only came a decade later and the operation only came out of the paper more than a decade later, in September 2018
The company initially came up with smartphone insurance, which remains the main business. Automobile insurance, launched last year, is still being structured gradually, but is already starting to accelerate and is expected to leave São Paulo and Minas Gerais only to land in other regions of Brazil in 2021.
The idea of entering this market takes into account that more than 70% of the car fleet in Brazil has no insurance. There are more than 48 million cars, according to the National Confederation of Insurance Companies. The target audience, therefore, has been customers who have never taken out insurance. More than 40% of the startup’s customers fit this profile.
These are points that make Pier stand out among the more than 110 insurtechs operating in Brazil and fighting for a slice of a market that moved 270 billion reais last year, such as rivals Pitzi and Minuto Seguros, which have already raised hundreds of millions of dollars in contributions.
Outside of Brazil, it is worth highlighting Bright Health, a company founded in 2016 and which already has billionaire revenue, and Lemonade, which went public in August and is already close to tripling its market value (US $ 8.2 billion at the beginning of February Proof that caution can also be profitable.
