YC and Kepple Africa Ventures-backed, Curacel unveils new API platform that enables tech-led businesses to offer insurance to Africans
Curacel, a Nigerian-based Y Combinator-backed insurtech startup that develops insurance infrastructure for the African market, has announced a new platform that enables digital businesses to add insurance to their core product offerings.
Grow, an API-based platform, has been linked with 22 digital companies throughout Africa, including Topshop, Barter by Flutterwave, Float, Fingo, and Payhippo, allowing them to combine insurance packages with their core goods or provide insurance as a stand-alone service. In addition, by assisting insurance companies in the travel, health, and automobile industries in digitally distributing their products, the tool also enables new business opportunities.
“The opportunity is massive. And we’re not just looking at instances where people are buying insurance for themselves, we are also looking at insurable transactions — like you can bundle loans and life insurance,” said Henry Mascot, CEO and co-founder at Curacel.
Mascot launched the insurance technology startup with his co-founder John Dada in 2019, starting with a fraud detection system for a health insurance company. That particular project opened their eyes to the need for more technologies in the insurance market.
“We realized there were a bunch of problems. Insurance companies were losing a lot of money to fraud. And so we built the system for them,” said Mascot.
Curacel enables any hospital with a management system to link it to the startup’s APIs to connect smoothly with insurance providers and payment automation. Mascot says that its platform has served 4,000 hospitals and 15 partner insurance providers, including Old Mutual and AXA Mansard, and that its systems have handled claims worth $25 million.
“We have built infrastructure around insurance that enables the industry to work better from the process of selling insurance to making sure that the people who have insurance get paid quickly and efficiently,” said Mascot.
Curacel’s underlying technologies are now allowing them to construct a product with the potential to reach millions of people throughout its nine countries, including Nigeria and the Ivory Coast, as they look to expand beyond delivering software to companies. Curacel, which plans to reach the Egyptian market, raised $450,000 in pre-seed funding last year to help support its growth.
“There’s a full-stack of technology that is required to enable embedded insurance, like reconciliation, payment, reporting, and data to ensure that you recommend the right product to the right person. We started by building API infrastructure, but we’re a strong technology company, which makes it possible for us to deliver this product.” Mascot explained.
“People do not trust insurance companies because they don’t pay claims as fast as they should. And this can be tied to the slow manual process, which is where we come in; we provide the infrastructure for existing insurance companies and the ecosystem to make them more efficient and scale faster to capture the opportunity in Africa,” he added.