Behaviour-based rental insurance for next gen landlords & tenants
Summary[1]Edit
Husmus changes the way that rental risk is assessed. We provide insurance priced by a more inclusive risk model that facilitates easier access to housing for all tenant types and rewards users with positive rental behaviour with lower premiums. As such, our landlords are able to assure their profitability while our tenants reduce the costs of renting.
To improve landlord and tenant rental experiences by eliminating their respective risks and costs. Our ambition is to support 5 million users in 5 years.
Seeking to raise £350K for a 12-month runway, of which £230K is committed.
Investment Interview[1]Edit
Explain what your venture does.
Husmus is a smart assistant that offers landlords and tenants behaviour based insurance that reduces their rental costs.
Our proprietary algorithms use a combination of behavioural economics and predictive modelling to assess risk at an individual level in real-time with 99.8% accuracy. This allows us to instantly offer and price coverage in a way that rewards positive behaviour with lower premiums.
What stage is your business?
Pre-launch, we have signed an insurance panel and are working on our FCA certification.
Describe your advisers.
Advisers: Nick Lyons (CEO of NLG the UK's largest inventory company), Jane Silber (former CEO of canonical and board member to several series B+ startups), Rhona Campbell (board director of investing women).
Give an overview of your startup's financing history.
We have bootstrapped to date. We are in the middle of a pre-seed round and have raised 65% of our £350K goal.
Explain the ownership structure of your company.
100% owned by founders (Sarah 51%, Mattias 49%).
How many employees do you have?
- Sarah Wernér - Co-founder & CEO / full time
- Mattias Wernér - Co-founder & COO/CDO / full time
- Tom Grandgent - CTO / part time
Please provide the name of a lawyer, who will represent you for the upcoming investment round.
Seedlegals.
How much money are you seeking to raise in the current round?
£350,000.
Do you have any existing commitments to the current round?
Yes, commitments for 60%, sent cash 5%. We are waiting to hear on a grant which will provide an additional £350K.
Explain why you are raising finance.
The money will go to expanding the team (front-end dev, full stack dev, machine learning engineer), sales channel optimisation and launch support.
Please explain the history of your venture.
Our vision has always centred around making renting convenient. After feedback from our initial users, we have shifted from our initial focus on logistical convenience to financial convenience. We began our journey in the Aug 2019 and in Jan 2020 we started a paid for beta. During the 2020 lockdown we made improvements to our model and went to market to prove our concept in Sept. 2020. In Feb 2020 we began approaching insurance companies with our findings.
Please explain the longer term, future vision for the Company
Our short term plan is to launch our product and experiment with distribution channels. With our next funding round we will expand the team further and scale. Our long-term plans involve expanding to 5 key markets (UK, DE, NL, CH, HK) in the next 5 years offering a range of insurance products to serve renters and landlords.
Explain the core technologies and/or service propositions of your venture.
Ultimately, Husmus is a predictive model attached to user generated behavioural data. We use our predictions to price insurance offerings for landlords and tenants.
Does your commercial strategy rely on intellectual property assets?
We will patent protect for the tax benefits however as a software company that is not an immediate priority.
What commercial progress have you made?
Achievements:
- We’ve signed a global household name insurance carrier onto our panel and are in discussions with another two.
- Completed a 6 months pilot to validate our model during which we assessed over 1,000 tenants and predicted their behaviour 99.8% accuracy.
- Over 1,700 leads on our wait list.
- Partnered with Crisis charity for support and to co-develop and promote our tenant products.
- We are on track to launch in July 2021 following FCA certification.
References and notesEdit