GREENSBORO, N.C. – Rein, a technology platform that creates digital insurance products, was voted the audience’s favorite startup during Volvo Financial Services’ inaugural iLabX accelerator program Demo Day hosted at the captive’s headquarters on May 2.
“Rein is integrated insurance at scale,” Gagan Dhillon, vice president of partners and strategy at Rein, said during the event. “We take the complexity out of insurance products and digitize them through an online platform we build. Our use case was simple for VFS — build a scalable insurance program to help the customer journey.”
The startup, founded in 2015, has raised $7.3 million in funding to date. It is on track to expand globally via its collaboration with the captive, though the company is currently licensed to work only in the U.S.
“The best part [of iLabX] is we are not done yet,” Dhillon said. “The Rein company will scale globally to drive business for Volvo Finacial Services and Volvo Group and create new lines of business through connected insurance, and we can’t wait to get started.”
Seven startups — ranging from mobility, blockchain, artificial intelligence, and insurance technology — took the stage to present their products to an audience of 200 VFS executives during Demo Day. Aside from Rein, the other participating companies were DOVU, E-bot7, Encompass-CX, Launch Mobility, Supermoney, and Wagonex.
The iLabX program was a test for the captive to determine which technology disruptors are ripe for investment. In the end, VFS also learned about the journey of collaboration between a startup and a captive.
“While corporate accelerators are new to us, it is not a new concept for other players,” said Allen Atchley, vice president of global strategy and head of innovation at VFS. “What we did is spend a lot of time having conversations with those players to understand what are the success factors to running a successful accelerator.”
Atchley continued, “What we found is a lot of variation — some of the same models deployed by different organizations have different levels of success. So it seems like the secret sauce to this is to understand: How do things actually get done in your organization? And make sure you tailor the program to fit into the strengths that you already do well.”
The iLabX program was developed through a partnership with L Marks, a program management firm that specializes in innovation. L Marks ran BMW Financial’s Collaboration Lab in 2018.
For more content like this, check out our upcoming event Auto Finance Accelerate, May 13-16 at the Omni San Diego. Visit www.AutoFinanceAccelerate.com to register.
