The startup revolutionising insurance for European expats with bespoke, digital-first solutions – Feather raises €6 million in funding. The round was led by Keen Venture Partners with Plural and senior leaders from Allianz, AXA and Bastian*.
These investors join Feather’s cap table alongside Monzo founder Tom Blomfield; GoCardless and Nested’s Matt Robinson; N26’s CTO Gino Cordt and Oyster founder, Tony Jamous.
The funding will help Feather accelerate its expansion into new European markets creating a pan-European product which expats can take with them from country to country, making it as easy as possible to adjust their cover.
The first pan-European insurance
Feather is on a mission to change the reputation of the insurance industry by becoming the trusted, digital insurance platform for expats across Europe. There are now over 50 million expats living and working in Europe, each of whom require different types and levels of cover. This is causing demand for flexible, transparent, and comprehensible insurance solutions to soar. The expat health insurance market alone is set to be worth $67.92 billion by 2031.
Yet today’s insurance offerings fall short in meeting the needs of this mobile workforce, and student population. They’re too complicated for non-native speakers to understand; fragmented, and don’t easily translate across borders.
Feather was founded by Rob Schumacher and Vincent Audoire in 2018, while participating in Entrepreneur First’s first Berlin cohort. After relocating to Germany, the pair struggled to navigate its insurance system and decided to create a bespoke platform to solve all of these shortcomings. It’s the service the founders wish they had – a digital platform, built from the ground-up, offering honest, unbiased advice and recommendations. Combining simple, digital claims processes, transparent policies, customisable plans designed to suit the changing needs of those who move from country to country for work – whether through choice or necessity, and human customer service without paying a premium. The demand for insurance products for expat workers is only set to increase as many of Europe’s biggest economies have ageing populations and are more and more dependent on hiring immigrant workers.
Digital-first, cross-border, seamless insurance
At the core of this approach is Feather’s purpose-built and modular full-stack tech platform. By partnering with leading insurance companies, Feather combines the agility of a tech startup with the reliability of established insurers. This ensures regulatory compliance while allowing Feather to manage all aspects of the insurance process online and in-house – from policy documentation to claims processing. This not only makes Feather cheaper, and more responsive but it allows them to offer a better user experience, backed by 4.9 star reviews across TrustPilot and Google.
Building on momentum
After bootstrapping for two years the company took its first funding in 2021. This latest fundraise takes the total raised to €10m. To date, Feather has helped 50,000+ people from over 150 countries get insurance digitally. It currently serves expats in Germany, France and Spain with three more countries set to launch by the end of 2024. Having established the platform and partnerships, this expansion is backed by rapid growth, with its most recent launch into Spain already showing significant trajectory; achieving more in the six months post-launch than Feather did in its first 18 months in Germany.
Rob Schumacher, co-founder of Feather, said: “Our mission has always been clear: to build an insurance platform that not only meets the needs of today’s expats but does so with transparency, simplicity, and trust. This funding represents a vote of confidence in our vision and our technology, and we are excited about the opportunities it opens up for us to serve the expat community across Europe even better.”
Taavet Hinrikus, Partner at Plural said: “With a laser focus on expats’ needs and a best-in-class tech platform, Feather is breaking down the complex, regulated insurance industry with an exceptional founder, and market fit. There are many parallels to the growth and trajectory of Wise and Feather’s early success is a clear sign of things to come. It’s exciting to see the first real signs of international traction that we’re going to build on in the next few years.”
Abdul Afridi, from Keen said: “Feather’s approach to insurtech stands out in a crowded market. Their expat experience resonated with me as a fellow expat but what has convinced me of the investment case was the robust technology and clear path to scalability Rob and Vincent have built. We believe in Feather’s vision of a genuinely pan-European insurance product and are excited to support them achieving this mission.”