Finaeo, announced today that the Company has closed its Seed Round, oversubscribed at $2.25M, lead by Impression Ventures with participation from Toronto-based angel investors, 500 Startups, Robo Ventures and iGan Partners.
Finaeo helps financial advisors win in a digital era. By digitizing the administrative process from prospect-to-purchase, they help advisors reduce the burden of manual paperwork and old processes. A robust front-end platform, delivered as software as a service, allows advisors to better manage and serve their end-customers.
"The investment enables us to pursue an opportunity to resolve a disconnect in the industry," said Aly Dhalla, CEO, and co-founder. "We believe the future of advisors is the hybrid 'bionic' advisor: blending robo-advice, AI capabilities, and the necessary human touch. Advisors are here to stay, but they will need to evolve to stay relevant.”
The funds will be deployed to bring on the engineering talent required to continue development of the core platform and marketplace. “Using the platform to enable the demand-side of the market, Finaeo is establishing a policy marketplace that links customers, brokers and insurance companies by creating the underlying ‘connective tissue’ to automate the data flow, which traditionally has been a highly manual and cumbersome supply chain process,” states Donald Chu, COO and co-founder. “By connecting the stack, Finaeo morphs into a Digital Intermediary that provides advisors, their clients, and suppliers an end-to-end digital experience.”
“This is an industry ripe for innovation,” says Christian Lassonde, Founder and Managing Partner of Impression Ventures. “Finaeo is disrupting the insurance supply chain by digitizing and automating the end to end process, making it more transparent and efficient to purchase insurance. The Finaeo team has the capability, background and proven track record to scale their solution. All of these factors combined is exactly what we look for when making early stage investments." Lassonde will be joining the Finaeo Board.
In 2016, the total North American insurance intermediary layer generated approximately $220B in revenues, of which the total addressable market for individual insurance (Life, Critical Illness, Disability, etc.) and group insurance (employee benefits) is approximately $66B.
“With the push for employers to provide competitive hiring packages and the increased risk of health related deaths, the push for insurance distribution will likely continue to rise,” states Dhalla. “With that said, the customer experience must evolve and advisors need to adopt a technology-first approach to their business to keep up. There are approximately 1.1M financial advisors in North America. Finaeo will be the partner that will keep them competitive.”