71. Homelyfe

Founders: Peter Goodman and Andrew Craven
Founded: 2015 (Launched October 2017)
Website: www.homelyfe.com

Tired of “jumping through hoops” and answering the same questions over and over whilst trying to buy travel insurance, serial entrepreneur Peter Goodman knew there had to be a more customer-centric approach to buying home insurance.

He teamed up with Andrew Craven – with whom he’d already founded social advertising platform Brighter Option (now Social.com) which they sold to Buddy Media and subsequently Salesforce – to launch Homelyfe.

Homelyfe is a digital home insurance service that enables consumers to find and buy cover in under four minutes. Free to download, the business takes aa commission on every policy sold.

Built from the ground up, its technology has been able to do away with “unnecessary questions” and streamline the customer experience.

In fact, the process is so streamlined that the record time for a Homelyfe customer to find and buy insurance through its platform is 85 seconds!

Focused on home insurance for the time being, Homelyfe says its technology allows it to create new lines of insurance in “a fraction of the time” it would take a traditional company.

But Goodman and Craven admit it wasn’t easy to get started: as a regulated business, the start-up still had to jump through a large number of hoops before it could start trading.

However, it was the reactions of “amazement and enthusiasm” from senior people in the insurance industry that told them they were on the right track – and backing from investors helped concrete this.

Homelyfe raised an impressive £2.4m in a seed funding round led by Talis Capital and Peterson Ventures just after its full launch in October 2017, which it used to invest in technical development and recruitment.

The next 12 months will see the start-up embark on a campaign of customer acquisition and explore new opportunities for fast and comprehensive cover. Beyond that lies the ambition of becoming one of the “most recognised” names in insurance and global growth.