The French startup Seyna has a new CEO. Stephen Leguillon joins the company as managing director, while Philippe Mangematin resigns from his daily activities for personal reasons – he becomes honorary chairman.
If you are unfamiliar with the company, Seyna is an Insurtech startup that has been granted an insurance license to provide property and casualty insurance. This is a significant step as the French regulator (ACPR) has not issued a new license in this category since 1983.
The company’s go-to-market strategy is also interesting as it does not sell insurance products directly to consumers. Instead, the company is expanding insurance-as-a-service products. It works with other companies that offer Seyna’s insurance products under their own brands.
Behind the scenes, Seyna offers an API for generating insurance contracts on demand – an API is a programming interface through which two services can interact with each other. You can also connect directly to Seyna’s user interface to manage contracts.
Seyna has created its own core insurance system, which is an important differentiating factor compared to older players. The startup can generate many different variants that cover around 20 different insurance products – pet insurance, ticket cancellation, rental guarantees, etc. Customers include Garantme and Decathlon.
The company’s new CEO, Stephen Leguillon, previously co-founded La Belle Assiette, a company that lets you hire a chef for a home dinner that I wrote about at TechCrunch. He added a second product called GoCater, a catering service for businesses – GoCater was spun off from a letter from La Belle Assiette and taken over by ezCater.
Seyna has raised a starting round of 14 million euros (currently 17 million US dollars) from Global Founders Capital, Allianz France, Financière Saint James and several business angels. Insurance companies need a lot of capital to operate. So the starting round for the French market seems to be quite big.