Nigerias Curacel raises funding to power insurance offerings and expand into North Africa

News Summary

  • The pivot meant that Curacel’s new business focused on providing technology to help insurers mitigate losses while digitizing and settling more legitimate claims, with only human intervention required for quality control.“In late 2019, we started solving a problem for health insurance companies around the infrastructure for digitizing claims.
  • It also sets take rates on premiums and charges businesses for using its APIs.While it currently works around claims and distribution, Mascot said Curacel would be looking to provide underwriting and insurance payment services via its APIs.
  • Companies such as Harlem Capital-backed Lami and Naspers-backed Naked provide similar services to increase insurance penetration across their respective markets.“We’ve got claims and distribution, which are our go-to products.
  • But soon, the co-founders realized a much bigger problem facing healthcare, particularly as regards insurance.Even though insurance penetration is very low in Africa, many insurers’ processes are time-consuming, expensive and prone to fraud and waste because they use paper and antiquated technology.
  • So far, its tech caters to distribution and claims automation.The distribution business is essentially its embedded insurance product Grow.
  • And our key thought when we started doing that was insurance companies across the continent were losing about 20% of their premiums to fraud, waste and abuse.
As many as 2.8% of Africans are uninsured, which is less than half the global average of 6.3%, making it the least insured continent in the world. Despite the abysmal number, theres some good news. A [+6292 chars]