Deal highlights

• Event-based insurance to help people recover from a natural disaster 
• Over $1M in seed funding raised to date
• Addressing a $100B global market; $20B in the US alone
• Targeting 4M customers by 2023
• 60% of growth is driven by customer referrals
• First company offering parametric insurance for earthquakes in US
• Domain-expert CEO co-founded two other quake-related organizations

No one, especially the uninsured, is ready for a disaster

Natural disasters are devastating - not just in terms of damage, but financially.  And most of us don’t have a financial cushion. For hazards like floods and earthquakes that are excluded from regular insurance, 9 out of 10 people lack coverage.  

But what’s worse?  No savings.  A majority of Americans don’t have even $500 to cover a surprise expense, much less the disruption of a natural disaster.

Disaster losses from a large event can be in the hundreds of billions.  Recent major earthquakes in the US, in Napa (2014) and Anchorage (2018), have caused losses estimated at $500 million or more. Per family, this equates to a whole year’s median salary - tens of thousands of dollars - and much of this is due to the cost of disruption, even if your home is undamaged.

Jumpstart is protecting more people with low-cost, no-hassle insurance 

Jumpstart provides a financial cushion - a jumpstart - after the shock of a natural disaster.  We’ve introduced a new product category - called parametric insurance - that democratizes disaster insurance.  Parametric means a lump-sum is paid out right away after a pre-defined event, i.e. a “parameter.” 

Jumpstart keeps what people love about insurance - getting money when they need it most - while eliminating what people hate - no delays, no paperwork, no deductible, no visit from an insurance adjuster.

By making disaster insurance simple, fast, and affordable, Jumpstart makes it dramatically more accessible, building financial resilience for more people. It’s like micro-insurance for the developed world.

Our first product is for the “earthquake drought” in California.  With your help we will soon be able to extend Jumpstart’s parametric concept to other natural disasters and to other states.

How it works

1. Customers pay a low monthly cost in premiums (average $20/month). 

2. In an earthquake, we use data from the US Geological Survey to determine which customers experienced intense shaking (the “red zone” on the USGS ShakeMap).

3. If your address is in the red zone of that quake, we text you to say you’re eligible for payout - whether you have damage or not.

4. You simply reply to our text message to confirm that you've been affected. 

5. We initiate a direct-deposit of your payout as soon as you respond.

Here’s what the Jumpstart payout zone would have looked like in the 2014 Napa earthquake.

Viral loop here we come

Jumpstart started selling parametric insurance for California quake in October 2018.  We launched direct to consumer (B2C), but not at the exclusion of distribution partnerships (B2B).  

Initially most of our customers are B2C.  What’s most exciting is that more than 60% of the growth is coming from word-of-mouth referrals from other customers.  And, every time there’s a small earthquake we get a surge in new customers.

In the B2B channel we’re getting interest across a variety of verticals, most notably companies offering Jumpstart as an employee benefit.  (Ask your employer for Jumpstart!)   Partnerships will be the key to scaling-up growth, and we have dozens of discussions in the pipeline.

Strong launch, amazing feedback

We launched direct to customer in October 2018, and so far our customers love us.

Check out our fantastic customer reviews on Yelp and Clearsurance.

Our customers span the demographic spectrum.  However, we’re seeing clusters of customers in two distinct segments:

1. Under-35 renters who haven’t accumulated much savings

2. Nearing-retirement homeowners who don’t want to tap their savings in a disaster

Here are real quotes from real customers in each of those segments:

Here are some more quotes from real customers:

We earn recurring revenue without bearing risk

We operate on an insurance brokerage business model.  Customers pay their premiums to us.  We retain 20-30% gross margin (commission) and remit the net premium to certain underwriters at Lloyd’s.  Lloyd’s bears 100% of the responsibility to make post-disaster payouts to customers.  

Get 10x more money flowing after a disaster

Jumpstart is a Benefit Corporation with the mission to build financial resilience.  Our specific social impact goal is to multiply the amount of economic stimulus flowing into a region - 10x more money - after a big disaster.

In the words of Kate Stillwell, CEO: “As a structural engineer, I worked to make the world a safer place in earthquakes.  But at the time of Hurricane Katrina, I experienced a professional crisis - there are much bigger problems.  In the next big earthquake, my hometown of Oakland could be the next New Orleans.  If people move away, the fabric of the city will change forever.”

There are many pieces to the resilience puzzle but perhaps the biggest gap is money.  Money - sometimes even small amounts - can make a huge difference in post-disaster resilience.  It can tip the balance between being able to stay in the area to tough it out and help neighbors rebuild, or move away and re-start life from scratch.

Jumpstart has huge potential to be a force of change to create community resilience.  An internal study on the opportunity for impact - just for earthquakes - found that if only 1 out of 10 people buys Jumpstart, it will multiply economic stimulus 50x after a moderate quake like the one in 2014 in Napa, and by 3x - $7 billion dollars - in a Big One (Magnitude 6.8 on the Hayward Fault.)

Targeting high-risk zones

More than 40 million Americans live in an earthquake zone.  Another 50 million are exposed to other natural hazards, notably flood, which, like earthquake, is excluded from typical insurance.  Worldwide, the “protection gap” - insurance-speak for the untapped market - is $180 Billion annually.  

Our product can help people living in any disaster region, and we have plans to expand.  We started in California because our Founder has domain expertise in earthquake modeling, and also because of the high concentration of risk.  We are in active discussions with counterparts in Chile and Japan to discuss parametric earthquake insurance for consumers in those countries.

For California earthquakes alone, the potential market is $6B.  (Today, with 1 out of 10 buying coverage, the CA quake market is about $800 Million.)  Our 5-year goal is only a fraction of this potential - $600 Million in revenue - including product expansion within the US.

Jumpstart is the first to bring parametric earthquake insurance to U.S. consumers

We have no direct competitors at the moment.  The vast majority of conventional earthquake insurance in California is provided by the quasi-governmental California Earthquake Authority (CEA).

Glenn Pomeroy, CEO of the California Earthquake Authority has gone on record stating that Jumpstart and CEA are not competitive products.  In some respects, Jumpstart is an introductory product that could lead to future purchases of conventional insurance like CEA.

Raised more than $1M to date

Jumpstart has raised over $1,000,000 in seed funding to date from a variety of individual and organizational investors.  Notable investors include:

Natural disasters are just the beginning

Jumpstart aims to make parametric insurance so common that “Jumpstart Policy” becomes a generic term for any coverage with fast, fixed payouts. Moving from earthquakes to other hazards and other states, our long-term plan is to provide parametric insurance for disasters around the world.  The reason we’re raising money is to support that product expansion.

Kate calls it her “life’s work” to build resilience.  She has 20 years of domain expertise in the science and risk of earthquakes.  “There’s nothing I would rather do with my time and talents than make Jumpstart a reality and bring it to millions of people.”  The “short list” of Kate’s accomplishments include:

• named “Insurance Innovator to Watch” by Digital Insurance

• Co-Founder, US Resiliency Council

• Co-Founder, Global Earthquake Model Foundation

• licensed Structural Engineer in California

• registered Disaster Service Worker by the State of California

• Past President, Structural Engineers Association of Northern California

• Housner Fellow, Earthquake Engineering Research Institute

• formerly Product Manager of Earthquake Models at EQECAT (now CoreLogic)

• Stanford University, MS Civil Engineering

• UC-Berkeley - Haas School of Business, MBA

• University of Minnesota, Bachelor of Civil Engineering

Let's shake up the industry!

Together we can build financial resilience, unlock an untapped market, and democratize disaster insurance.