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Why the Best InsurTech Founders Aren’t Building InsurTech At All

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Harry Croydon, Co-Founder of MIC Global, an embedded microinsurance company that’s raised over $13 million in funding, shared a counterintuitive truth that every insurance technology founder needs to hear: stop trying to sell technology to insurance companies.

“We aren’t an insurtech, we are an insurance company enabled by technology,” Harry explains, cutting through years of industry buzzwords to reveal a fundamental misunderstanding that has plagued countless startups in the space.

This distinction isn’t semantic. It represents a complete reimagining of how to build and scale in one of the world’s most traditional industries.

The Fax Machine Era of Insurance

Harry’s journey in insurance began in 1999, at a moment when the entire world was grappling with what the internet actually meant. His entry point was cyber insurance, which the industry then called “insuring the Internet.”

“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,” Harry recalls. The reality was far different: “When we went there to sell it, amazingly, nobody could access a website. They all wanted it done by fax machines.”

That experience taught him a lesson that would prove invaluable decades later: insurance moves slowly, very slowly. Understanding this tempo became critical to survival, especially when navigating the dot-com bubble burst and the industry’s complete shutdown following 9/11.

“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,” Harry reflects on those early years.

The Convergence That Created MIC Global

Fast forward to 2019. The infrastructure had finally caught up to the vision. AI, machine learning, and big data were no longer just concepts for academics. The gig economy had created demand for insurance by the mile, by the project, by the night. Mobile phones had become distribution networks in everyone’s pocket.

Harry approached his future co-founder Jamie Crystal with this thesis, only to discover an remarkable coincidence. “I said, I’m thinking about setting up a company like this. What do you think? And he said, well, interesting enough, I’ve just bought microinsurance.com. He’d actually bought that URL literally two weeks before.”

They founded MIC Global with a broker mindset, attempting to place individual deals with major carriers like AIG and Munich Re. For six to nine months, they pursued projects worth hundreds of thousands of dollars each, only to hit the same wall repeatedly.

“Despite having that work and despite having those projects and the clients wanting to do it, it took us a long time to get those companies to basically say, no, they don’t want to do it,” Harry explains. The insurers thought the deals were too small, too difficult, or simply not for them.

The Pivot That Changed Everything

Rather than continue banging their heads against this wall, Harry and Jamie made a critical decision: they would become an insurance company themselves. In 2020, they set up their first insurance entity, enabling them to say yes when larger players said no.

This wasn’t about building better technology for insurance companies to ignore. It was about having the capacity and capability to actually write business.

“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,” Harry states simply, describing what became their fundamental competitive advantage.

Embedded Insurance Beyond the Buzzword

MIC Global focuses on embedded microinsurance, but Harry draws a sharp distinction between traditional program insurance and what they’re building. The difference lies in the placement within the customer journey.

“It’s allowing the customer to go on his journey to buy whatever product they’re looking at,” Harry explains, using rental insurance as an example. “When they come to sort of agree to pay fifteen hundred dollars a month for their rent, then we can also cover them for their loss of income if they lose their job, we can cover them for $1,500 a month for three or four months as well for a premium.”

The key is relevance and simplicity at the point of sale. It’s the difference between pushing a 48-clause travel insurance policy for $500 versus offering flight delay and baggage coverage for $10 embedded directly in the ticket purchase flow.

The Multi-Channel GTM Strategy

While many startups narrow their focus to scale, MIC Global deliberately maintained multiple distribution channels: direct sales, broker partnerships, and insurance company collaborations. This approach seemed counterintuitive but proved essential.

“What we’ve done is really focus on this global nature, hence MIC Global and also had a kind of a multi channel approach which is I think different to a lot of startups that we see,” Harry notes.

Working with insurance companies around the world, from India to Saudi Arabia to South America, MIC Global doesn’t just compete with these carriers. They enable them. “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.”

This creates a network effect: when platform companies go global quickly, MIC Global can leverage their insurer partnerships to place business across multiple markets simultaneously.

The Harsh Reality for InsurTech Founders

When asked what advice he’d give insurance technology founders, Harry doesn’t mince words: “Don’t do it.”

He elaborates: “Insurance companies, you know, they spend a lot of money on things, but you know, they take a long time to buy technology. This is why we aren’t an insurtech, we are an insurance company enabled by technology.”

The sales cycles are brutal, regardless of whether you’re selling to brokers or carriers. Everyone wants semi-bespoke solutions. “I built my first policy management system in 1999 and I haven’t really seen anything that’s much different. Despite everything that people say, even today, they’re all the same.”

His advice: build something smart and clever that solves a specific need, preferably tools for modeling hurricanes or wildfires, something concrete. But don’t assume you understand insurance just because you’ve built great software.

Looking Forward

Harry sees the next three to five years bringing massive change in technology adoption across insurance, particularly around claims management, customer service, and fraud detection. But the real opportunity lies in embedded microinsurance reaching mass markets globally.

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

The lesson from MIC Global’s journey is clear: in insurance, technology is the enabler, not the product. The winners won’t be the companies building better software for insurance companies. They’ll be the insurance companies that happen to be built on better software.