Company: Laka
Founder(s): Tobias Taupitz and Ben Allen
Website: https://laka.co/gb
Description: A peer-to-peer bicycle insurance platform to cover bicycles and other cycling equipment in the event of theft or damage.
Laka is the transformative bicycle insurance company that is powered by the customer.
In an interview with Runway East, co-founder Ben Allen (pictured) explained:
“The initial idea came from my co founder, Tobi. He was working for Barclays and saw all this innovation in fintech, but nothing exciting happening in insurance and he thought “maybe there’s another way to go about it”. Laka has all the same parts but we’re re-thinking insurance centred around the customer. The core problem is that, because you pay upfront, the customer is always in the worst position. When it comes to claiming, you know and the insurance company knows that if they pay out, they’re affecting the bottom line. They may want to give you a good service but you can’t really fight that core conflict of interest.”
“Laka was born out of the idea that we should do this in a different way. Instead of asking for premiums upfront, we onboard people into similar groups, so that you get a sense of belonging to the community, and increasingly it will be with people who cycle in the same patterns and have the same kind of involvement with the sport. We settle claims as they come in over the course of the month, and at the end of the month we take the cost of claims we’ve had that month, we add a percentage fee on top and then we split the bill pro-rata between the people in the group.”
“That means you pay a fair price based on the actual losses that have occurred in the group. We are incentivised to pay out, within reason, and the way we police ourselves is that there is a cap each month on how much a customer has to pay. So you’ll never have to pay more than that cap.”
The company has secured £6.8 million in funding to date.
