Hedvig Becomes First European Neoinsurer to Transition from MGA to a Full Stack Carrier

In less than three years, Swedish neoinsurer Hedvig has reached an important milestone. With a newly granted EU insurance carrier license the company is ready for a European expansion, and has the freedom required to take its product innovation to the next level.

Hedvig was launched in Sweden in 2018 and offers home and all-risk insurance. The goal was to create an insurance service and experience that people long to use. Today the company insures over 50,000 people in Sweden and Norway and 40% of the company’s growth is organic or through recommendation. During 2020 the company grew over 200% and today Hedvig takes 8% of every new home insurance policy signed in its core market, all signs that the initial ambition has played out well.

Hedvig has now reached an important milestone, becoming the first European neoinsurer to transition from being an MGA (a managing general agent, where insurances are underwritten by a partner) into a full stack carrier. The carrier license is valid across the European Union which paves way for an expansion beyond the Nordic countries.

– With the carrier license we are ready to make the Hedvig experience available throughout Europe. The Nordics stand out globally when it comes to digitization of the insurance industry and high customer satisfaction. Despite that, we manage to exceed peoples’ expectations on a daily basis, our NPS score is ten times higher than the Nordic industry average. With that track record we are confident that Hedvig will be well-received by European consumers, says Lucas Carlsén, CEO & co-founder of Hedvig.

The carrier license also opens up for product innovation that challenges the core of the insurance industry.

– We went into this industry with first principles thinking. We wanted to challenge the assumptions that insurance has to be complex and conflicted, and thereby unpredictable and painful for the consumer. But in order to be able to really execute on the solutions we envision to these problems we needed to have the freedom of our own license. Now we have that license, says Lucas Carlsén.

In connection with becoming a licensed carrier Hedvig has teamed up with some of the world’s biggest reinsurance companies, with the company’s reinsurance panel being led by French global Tier 1 reinsurer SCOR securing a solid foundation for the upcoming expansion.

To date, Hedvig has raised €20m in equity. Hedvig’s investors include Silicon Valley based Obvious Ventures, started by Twitter and Medium co-founder Ev Williams, German insurtech fund CommerzVentures, European seed-fund Cherry Ventures, Klarna-founder Victor Jacobsson and angel investor Khaled Helioui.