Fintech Spotlight: Mexico-Based Insurtech Guros Bags $5.8M At $30M Valuation

Guros, a fintech in Mexico that’s transforming the insurance experience, formally announced the closure of a $5.8 million investment round.

As part of the development, Benzinga spoke with Guros cofounder and CEO Juanma Gironella.

About: “It kind of feels like insurance ends right after you purchase it.”

That’s according to Gironella, a financial services veteran that’s working to democratize access to insurance for both providers and consumers.

“The entire industry is focused on selling policies, and no one is trying to fix what having insurance means,” he explained. “We created a marketplace which gives you an auto insurance quote with just three data points and no information about yourself.

“No phone calls, no nothing.”

After cutting his teeth at incumbents like Grupo Llamex, Segurosbroker.com, among other players in the space, Gironella teamed up with his family to disrupt old processes with respect to insurance operations and technology.

He told Benzinga innovation dried up given the high average age of insurance agents and demand for business today, not the future.

“The typical insurance experience implies you go onto a website, give 15 to 20 different data points about yourself, get 30 phone calls, and then never hear back after you purchase,” Gironella said.

“If Plaid and SelectQuote had a Mexican son, that would be us,” he chuckled.

Core Product: “Guros is democratizing access to insurance for both end-users and a growing set of fintechs entering Mexico, or being created to offer auto insurance.”

In the simplest way, Guros allows consumers to gain control over their insurance policies regardless if they are a Guros policyholder or not.

Through the Guros wallet, policyholders have the ability to save their insurance information in one digital location. Additionally, car owners can track taxes, speeding tickets, and driving restrictions free of charge.

Differentiators: Speed and connectivity.

In under one minute, insurance buyers can receive and compare quotes. On the other hand, insurance sellers are provided a standardized platform to plug into.

“The idea is to find partners who are tech-savvy, who want and can offer insurance, but want to do so in a much easier way,” Gironella said in reference to Guros’ close work with providers like Albo, Mexico’s largest neobank.

With Guros, “you are not constrained by the state of technology, and you can develop your own technology so you can go faster than the rest of the industry.”

Recent Developments: For years, Guros was bootstrapped. Then, in a May 2020 seed round, the firm secured $1.2 million from LEAP Global Partners, Peñaverde and Magma Partners.

In light of 600% growth since then, Guros added $5.8 million at a $30 million valuation in a round led by F-Prime Capital and Cometa with participation from Clocktower and Snejina Zacharia, CEO, and Co-Founder of Insurify.

Existing investors Leap and Magma Partners participated as well.

“We were approached by F-Prime, the venture capital firm from Fidelity, and they offered to lead kind of a seed extension or pre-Series A because they believed in what we were doing,” Benzinga was told. “They believe in the pain in the market and how hard it is to sell insurance, and that the experience of the customer needs to be fixed.”

Going Forward: Guros aims to improve its auto insurance capabilities and expand into other insurance verticals

“We feel that as long as the customer remains in the center of the conversation, we should be able to continue moving forward and prove to the market that it’s not customers who are not ready to purchase insurance online. It’s the industry who is not ready.”