The Story of MIC Global: Building the Future of Embedded Microinsurance

The Story of MIC Global: Building the Future of Embedded Microinsurance

Two weeks can change everything. In 2019, Harry Croydon was preparing to pitch his co-founder Jamie Crystal on starting a microinsurance company. He had the thesis ready: AI was maturing, mobile phones had become ubiquitous distribution channels, and the gig economy had created massive demand for insurance by the project, by the night, by the mile.

When Harry made the pitch, Jamie’s response stopped him cold: “Well, interesting enough, I’ve just bought microinsurance.com. He’d actually bought that URL literally two weeks before.”

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Harry Croydon, Co-Founder of MIC Global, an embedded microinsurance company that’s raised over $13 million, shared the remarkable story of how that coincidence launched a company that’s reimagining insurance for the platform economy.

The Long Road to 2019

Harry’s path to microinsurance began two decades earlier, in an era when most people still used fax machines. In 1999, he entered the insurance industry through cyber insurance, back when the industry called it “insuring the Internet.”

“When you cast your mind back to 1999, the Internet had just been invented. AI was for boffins somewhere. Mobile phones were sort of penetrating a lot of the world,” Harry recalls. His technology background led him to assume websites would revolutionize insurance sales. Reality proved different.

“I thought, oh, what we do is we build a website, put it on the website and sell it to all the people in America. And when went there to sell it, you know, amazingly, nobody had a. Nobody could access a website. They all wanted it done by fax machines.”

That experience taught Harry patience, a lesson that proved critical when navigating the dot-com bubble burst. During that era, venture capital went from absurd abundance to sudden scarcity. “We would be invited to these .com events and you’d have little badges put on you and people would be desperate to sort of give you money,” Harry remembers. Investors would ask what they’d do with $30 million when they only needed $2 million.

Then everything changed. “We did get funding through that time and very interestingly we also closed around, I think it was in June 2001. And trying to track down the actual VC with the money was quite hard at the end, you know, because they had promised to pay for it, but of course the bubble had burst and they didn’t want to pay the money anymore.”

Three months after closing that round, 9/11 happened. The insurance industry froze completely. “After 911 ground to a halt for several months and any deal we had stopped, everything stopped, we had no income, nothing, all just ground to a halt.”

The lesson stuck with Harry for the next two decades: “You never know what’s coming your way. So you can’t just crack on and spend money. And you’ve got to kind of protect yourself from the unknown really all the time.”

The Convergence of Forces

Between 2001 and 2019, Harry watched multiple technological and economic shifts align. Machine learning evolved from academic theory to practical application. Big data infrastructure became accessible. The sharing economy created Uber, Airbnb, and countless platform businesses that needed flexible insurance products.

Most importantly, mobile phones became universal. They weren’t just communication devices anymore—they were distribution networks sitting in billions of pockets worldwide.

Harry stayed in touch with Jamie throughout these years, watching these trends develop. When the pieces finally aligned, both founders saw the same opportunity simultaneously. That’s what made the microinsurance.com coincidence so remarkable.

The Brutal First Nine Months

MIC Global launched in 2019 with what seemed like a solid plan. Both founders had broker backgrounds, so they’d operate as a broker: find customers, then place business with major insurance carriers.

They found customers quickly. “I found three or four projects to do like half a million dollars each, couple of million dollars of work,” Harry explains. Real projects, real budgets, real timelines. They approached the obvious partners: AIG, Munich Re, the major global carriers.

Then they waited. And waited.

“Despite having that work and despite having those projects and the clients wanting to do it took us a Long time to get those companies to basically say, no, they don’t want to do it. You know, they thought it was too small or too difficult or not for them.”

Six months became eight months. Customer interest remained strong, but the carriers wouldn’t move. “We kind of got frustrated in the first sort of, you know, six to nine months with, we can’t place this business individually like this. You know, we couldn’t operate like just a broker.”

The revelation was clear: the industry lacked innovation for these new business models. Traditional carriers didn’t want to adapt their processes for short-term, flexible policies.

The Pivot That Defined Everything

Rather than continue fighting for scraps, Harry and Jamie made a fundamental decision. They would become an insurance company.

“We decided that we ought to become an insurance company so that we could say yes to these things, and that’s what we did. So in 2020, we set up our first insurance entity and started to place insurance into that.”

This wasn’t about building better technology for insurance companies. It was about having the capacity to write business directly. The shift transformed their value proposition overnight.

Now they could design products specifically for the platform economy, then accept business without waiting for carrier approval. “That made it a lot easier for us to say, you know, actually design products and then go and talk to clients about those products and our ideas and then accept it, and then we can place business and start writing business.”

Revenue began flowing in early 2020. But MIC Global wasn’t thinking locally—they were building global infrastructure from day one.

Building a Global Network

Most insurance startups focus on one market, usually their home country. MIC Global took the opposite approach, establishing partnerships with insurers across India, Saudi Arabia, the Middle East, the Americas.

The reasoning was strategic: their target customers—platform companies—go global quickly. “If like a, say like an Uber or something like that, they can start in one country and then very quickly accelerate around the world and be in different countries. And we felt that there wasn’t an insurance solution to sort of service that sort of company.”

This global-first approach created a network effect. When a platform company needs coverage across multiple markets, MIC Global already has the partnerships and infrastructure in place.

Their distribution strategy evolved too. Initially, they tried direct sales, finding individual clients one by one. “That’s hard work if you like. You know, finding these individual clients all the time. You need a big sales force.”

They shifted to selling through brokers, then discovered an unexpected opportunity: partnering with insurance companies themselves. “We thought it was obvious to go to brokers, but going to insurance companies was a bit of a surprise in a way to us,” Harry admits.

These carriers lacked microinsurance products, technology, and expertise. MIC Global could provide all three. “We’ve got the technology to help you, which is like an insure tech if you like, but we’ve actually got the capacity to back up the product as well.”

The Future of Embedded Insurance

Looking ahead, Harry sees massive transformation coming to insurance through technology adoption, particularly around claims management, customer service, and fraud detection.

But the real opportunity lies in embedded microinsurance reaching mass markets globally. The model—offering relevant, simple insurance products at the exact point of purchase—aligns perfectly with how people actually buy things today.

“Being able to do that quickly, efficiently and manage it all on technology will enable insurance to penetrate, you know, the mass markets, not just in America and South America, but around the world,” Harry envisions.

He sees MIC Global positioned at the convergence of several irreversible trends: platforms going global, consumers expecting seamless embedded products, and technology finally making micro-policies economically viable.

“You know, potentially could start to see an actual growth in the insurance numbers, you know, that we’re all excited to see.”

From fax machines in 1999 to embedded microinsurance in 2025, Harry’s journey spans the entire digital transformation of insurance. MIC Global represents not just what he learned along the way, but what becomes possible when infrastructure, demand, and innovation finally converge.

The two-week coincidence that launched the company wasn’t luck. It was two experienced founders recognizing the same inevitable future at the exact same moment.