Nigeria’s Casava has closed a $4,000,000 pre-seed round described as the largest pre-seed for an African insurtech company and second-largest for a Nigerian startup after Nestcoin’s round.
Berlin-based Target Global led the pre-seed round, with foreign VCs and angel investors such as Entrée Capital, Oliver Jung, Tom Blomfield, Ed Robinson and Brandon Krieg participating.
The local investors involved are all founders. They include Uche Pedro, Babs Ogundeyi, Musty Mustapha, Shola Akinlade, Olugbenga “GB” Agboola, Honey Ogundeyi and Opeyemi Awoyemi, among others.
Bode Pedro is the founder and CEO of Casava. Before starting Casava, Pedro ran VisaCover, an insurance brokerage company, in 2014. The idea for Casava came while VisaCover provided an alternative in the auto insurance market by allowing drivers of Uber, which was one of its partners, to make weekly insurance payments instead of quarterly or yearly payments insurance partners before it operated.
According to the company, subscribers can insure their income from $1 (~₦500) monthly, and get paid monthly for six months if they lose their job, become sick or disabled.
Subscribers can also use its Health Insurance product and access more than 1,000 doctors on telemedicine and 900 hospitals across Nigeria. There’s also HealthCash, which lets users get reimbursed when they visit the hospital for specific periods, all for ₦250 (~$0.5) – ₦300($0.6) a month.
Casava works with reinsurance partners who guarantee a refund when claims are paid as a licensed microinsurance underwriter. That’s how it makes revenue aside from profit — off subscription fees. The company already has more than 66,000 customers, with $16,000,000 in insurance coverage.
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