DeadHappy, the UK’s fastest-growing life insurance provider, has raised more than £11 million in equity in its latest funding round.
The Leicester-based firm prices its life insurance annually based on a customer’s current age and risk level – not a prediction about their risk of dying across the next 20 years.
Existing venture capital backers Octopus and Headline reinvested alongside new shareholders Volution, Verso Capital and Channel 4 Ventures.
DeadHappy, second on our InsurTech 50 ranking last year, also saw more than 1,000 individuals invest during its latest crowdfunding campaign via Seedrs.
As the UK’s first fully digital pay-as-you-go life insurance provider, the company has announced triple digit growth in just 12 months, fuelled by consumers seeking a no-nonsense approach to life insurance.
The new funding will allow the startup to power further growth by building the technology and capabilities of its ‘deathwish’ platform as they continue to reshape how people think about, talk about and plan for death.
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“We’re delighted to have such great support from the VC community as well as ‘the Crowd’,” said co-founder Phil Zeidler.
“There’s significant momentum behind revolutionising the life insurance space, but there is also a much broader opportunity for our deathwish platform which allows people to plan exactly what they want to happen when they die.
“We’re here to help our customers think about how they want to be remembered and enable those wishes to be tied into their life insurance plan, to give it a real meaning.”
The business has already seen an 87% year-on-year rise in consumers searching for ‘deathwishes’. Considered the brand’s USP, these are a way of helping customers express what they want to happen when they die.
“Some of the options we give them are the financial, responsible stuff – we have standard deathwishes for paying off the mortgage, school fees, one for debt,” Zeidler told our sister website TechBlast last year.
“We get the real engagement from customers when it comes to the other stuff: opting for a Viking or Star Wars funeral; to have your ashes fired into space so you’re up there when your loved ones look up at the stars at night. We partner with companies that can carry out these wishes.
“It might be leaving a pot of money to buy their son a brand new football kit every season or sending a bunch of very good mates on a final golfing tour in Vegas – one last hurrah.
“If you do this on a life insurance policy, you can put a pot of £25,000 in there for them and it might only cost you an extra £50 a month. You can do some pretty amazing things.”
More than 230,000 deathwishes have now been made by its customers while the company has sold more than 24,000 life insurance plans to date.
“We’re pleased to have proven that our product serves the market and the investment will allow us to scale our business further,” Zeidler added.