🌊The Business Wave #69

May 22, 2023

TLDR: We found the best stock index to get exposure to international stock market. Insurtech startups raised almost $300M. More problems for Peloton. Check out startup funding per city for Q1.

Investing

Nvidia is on the way to a $1 Trillion market cap.

Nubank deep dive👇

If you are looking to invest in digital bank Nubank, we wrote deep dive last week. You can check it out here.

Time to start looking at stocks outside the USA📈

Never bought any stock outside the USA, but this Tweet made me think to change that. Probably the best way is just to buy Vanguard Total International Stock Index Fund - VXUS 0.00%↑ and get exposure to the total international market.

Technology

SF is still the place to be if you are raising money for a startup

No other city/area comes even close to San Francisco (despite all the problems the city is facing). Boston is holding on a third place due to biotech funding. The most interesting thing is that there is no Miami on the list.

2.2 Million Peloton Exercise Bikes🚴Recalled

Peloton is recalling 2.2 million of its exercise bikes due to the seat post breaking during use, the company announced a few days ago. Peloton has received 35 reports of the seat post breaking and detaching from its original bike, which led to 13 reports of injuries including a fractured wrist, lacerations, and bruises.

In the middle of the pandemic, the share price was $162. We are not going to see that, but this could be a good time to buy at $7/share. They recently had layoffs, putting the costs under control and looking toward profitability.

No other CEO would say this😊

OpenAI's CEO testified before Congress yesterday: "We are not trying to get people to use our product more, we’d love it if they use it less, 'cause we don’t have enough GPUs”

Startup News and Funding

Insurtech funding week💰almost 300 million USD

Obie - insurtech for landlords🏠

Another story on how recognizing the right underserved market segment can be very lucrative! Obie, an insurtech that is targeting “mom and pop” residential real estate investors has raised an additional $25,5 million investment.

According to Obie, it has gone from securing insurance for over $3 billion worth of property to $20 billion worth.

When asked about Obie future and potential, co-founder Aaron Letzeiser said the following” There are over 18 million residential real estate investors in the U.S., and more than 90% of them are small ‘mom-and-pop’ investors who spend over $60 billion a year on insurance premiums, so there’s plenty of room for Obie to run here.”

Obie raised a total of $39 million since its 2017 inception.

Bolttech - $1,6 billion evaluation in 3 years💸

It does sound crazy, right?

Bolttech, an insurance exchange platform raised a $196 million round which brings its valuation to $1,6 billion. Founded in Singapore, in just 3 years the platform spread its operation across USA, Europe and Asia.

What exactly is Bolttech?

Bolttech bills itself as one of the world’s leading embedded insurance providers. Embedded means insurance or protection products that are embedded into the customer experience as they buy a product or sign up for a service. For example, someone purchasing a smartphone might be prompted to purchase a protection plan that offers repair, device replacement or trade-ins.

Bolttech uses a B2B2C approach, which means it connects more than 700 distribution partners around the world with 230 insurance providers, which offer 6,000 products to consumers.

Wefox is valued at $4.5B

Here there is a twist; it’s not the amount of money they raised, it’s about that they kept their valuation😁

Wefox, an insurtech from Germany did a $55 million extension of their Series D $400 million round, but they did it without a valuation change.

Why is this interesting?

Fintech/Insurtech sector took a big hit in 2022 and companies that wanted to raise new funds did that under lower valuations. Wefox managed to do the same under the same valuation which shows investors trust in their product.