Cassava Receives $4M Pre-seed To Make Insurance Affordable and Accessible for Nigerians
- February 2, 2022
- Posted by: NICCIadmin
- Category: News
African countries are yet to catch up on social security and protection programs In general Used in the West, where the government provides health insurance and unemployment benefits to citizens.
The general perception of insurance on the continent has been hazy over the years, and it has a low penetration rate, except in South Africa., per a McKinsey Study In 2018, the insurance market in Africa stood at a 3% penetration rate; Excluding South Africa, it was 1.12%,
Only 1.9% of its adult population had a form of insurance policy in Nigeria as of 2018. Despite the dire situation, several startups are emerging to widen insurance coverage across the country.
One such company is in news today: cassava, The self-described “Nigeria’s first 100% digital insurance company” has raised a $4 million pre-seed round. This is the largest pre-seed for an African insurtech company and the second largest for a Nigerian startup after Nestcoin, whose round Was declared one day before.
Berlin-based Target Global led the pre-seed round, which was attended by foreign VCs and angel investors such as Entry Capital, Oliver Jung, Tom Blomfield, Ed Robinson and Brandon Craig.
The local investors involved are all founders. These include Uche Pedro, Babs Ogundayi, Musti Mustafa, Shola Akinlade, Olugabenga “GB” Agboola, Hani Ogundayi and Opemi Awoyemi.
bode pedro And olusegun makinde Launched Cassava in April 2021. before this Starting Cassava, Pedro ran Visacover, an insurance brokerage company, in 2014. The idea for Cassava came about when VisaCover provided an alternative to the auto insurance market by allowing drivers of Uber, one of its partners, to make weekly insurance payments instead. The insurance partner pays quarterly or annually prior to its operation.
“We saw mass adoption and knew the need of the market” Insurance payment should be broken. But then we saw that as brokers, we didn’t have complete control over that process and we weren’t giving people the best experience,Pedro told Meczyki.Net over a call.