Notion's Itxaso del Palacio discusses the recent fundraise.
When I invested in YuLife in mid 2019, the company had 25 employees and was barely generating revenue. I met Sammy Ruben and Sam Fromson in their small offices in Candem and I fell in love with their vision, their energy and their commitment to disrupt the insurance industry. I loved their user-centric approach. As a product-led investor, it was easy for me to build conviction around their commitment to make life insurance a delightful experience for the end users.
Prior to YuLife, Sammy was the founding CEO at PruProtect (now VitalityLife) and through his previous experience, Sammy had tested the demand for a life insurance solution that rewards healthy behaviours. But he wanted to take it further than that. He wanted to leverage technology to provide a much better user experience to businesses, to HR managers and, of course, to employees. Sammy and Sam were joined by Josh as CTPO, Jaco and Jonathan. Today, YuLife is ensuring more than 400K lives at hundreds of UK companies. Yulife has gone through a phenomenal growth over the last two years and it has been consolidated as the leading alternative to the old school life insurance players in the UK.
YuLife was founded in 2016 in London aiming to disrupt the traditional life insurance industry. Instead of focusing on low-cost, low-value policies, YuLife offers a B2B life insurance product that encourages employees to be active. Through a gamified mobile application, YuLife allows employees to track their steps and meditation minutes, rewarding them with discounts and actual money to spend in brands such as Nike, Asos, John Lewis and Amazon. The engagement with the app is phenomenal and is allowing Yulife to set the basis to become the first ever variable pricing insurance solution. This means that companies that have more active and health-conscious employees will pay less for their insurance policies. Eventually, companies should be incentivising their employees to go for a short stroll or take a short break to do a 10 min meditation.
YuLife has grown incredibly fast in the last 2 years. They started selling into small businesses that didn’t have a life insurance policy in place and very quickly they moved to serve larger customers with over 3,000 employees. Among these larger customers, YuLife is replacing traditional life insurance players such as AVIVA. HR Managers love YuLife as it significantly reduces the onboarding and management of policies across the organisation. For the first time, companies in the UK can now get their employees up and running online - and remotely - with no need to complete forms or use email to get employees on board.
With the £10M Series A raised in 2019, YuLife has been consolidated as the preferred B2B life insurance product in the UK. With this £50M Series B, Yu;ife wants to build its presence internationally to become a global life insurance brand. We are thrilled to have the team at Target Global on board. Target has invested in other fast growing insurance businesses such as Zego and Wefox and we are sure they will be able to contribute with their experience in the industry. YuLife is following the trajectory of Lemonade, but taking advantage of the efficiencies and stickiness of the B2B go-to-market strategy.
As always, I am so proud of Sam, Sammy, Josh and the whole YuLife team and I am incredibly excited for the future of the global expansion opportunities. Onwards and upwards!