One of Russia’s first sizable insurtech projects is set to emerge soon, with millions of US dollars being invested in an online-only insurance offer. Dubbed ‘Mango,’ the platform will sell its own products and those of traditional insurance companies through a “technologically advanced marketplace,” CEO Viktor Lavrenko told Russian daily RBC earlier this month.
“Our idea is to look at traditional things in a new way, leveraging on foreign experience and hiring IT-skilled people. We plan to change the existing digital insurance market and create new ones, where we’ll be the absolute leader,” the entrepreneur added.
The project has been backed financially by Alfa Group, which includes a variety of companies in the fields of finance (Alfa Bank, Alfa Insurance, Alfa Capital, A1…) and retail (X5 Retail Group) as well as water supply. The exact amount of the investment in Mango has not been disclosed, but RBC’s sources put the figure anywhere between “a few million” and “10 million” USD.
Mango will target consumer groups from 20 to 40 years of age. It will not be integrated to the existing Alfa Insurance company, the sources said.
Lavrenko is a pioneer of the Russian IT entrepreneur scene. In the 2000s, he founded the search engine Nigma.ru, which failed to get traction in spite of capital injections from Yuri Milner’s DST fund. Having moved to Vietnam in the early 2010s, he launched there Côc Côc, a Vietnamese-language search engine. In 2015 the company, which had also developed a browser, an advertising branch and a geo location app, secured $14 million from Burda. The search engine and the browser currentlu stand second on the Vietnamese market after Google, notes RBC citing StatCounter.
The Russian insurtech startup market is still embryonic, KPMG Insurance Practice Director Dmitry Dolgikh told RBC.
“The most active in this field are insurance companies which are part of bank holdings, which can provide in-house financial technologies,” the expert noted.
Insurance culture is still little developed in Russia, which can be an obstacle to developing insurtech projects, notes a market player interviewed by RBC.
