Insurance Firm Hippo Gets $350M Investment From Mitsui Sumitomo

InsurTech group Hippo Enterprises has announced a capital investment of $350 million from Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance Company, a press release says.

Mitsui Sumitomo is a subsidiary of MS&AD Insurance Group Holdings, and Takashi Sato, managing partner for venture arm MS&AD Ventures, will be on Hippo’s board of directors now, the release says.

With the investment, Hippo will be able to keep expanding its online home insurance business across the U.S., with the goal “to reach 95 percent of the U.S. homeowners population in the next year, as well as providing additional capital for its insurance and reinsurance companies,” the release says.

The company, founded in 2015, provides insurance online with an efficient online purchase experience for users, a smart home kit with eligible policies and coverage available for things like appliances, electronics and home office, according to the press release.

And Hippo could be looking at more home insurance business in the next few years as more people leave the city for the suburbs.

“Mitsui Sumitomo is one of the best when it comes to risk management and shares our desire to leverage data and analytics to create better outcomes for homeowners,” said Assaf Wand, CEO and co-founder of Hippo. “We’re excited to deepen our partnership and gain additional catastrophe modeling expertise from one of the world’s largest insurers.”

Shinichiro Funabiki, director, vice president and executive officer at Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance Company, Limited, said the company values “the innovation that Hippo brought to the home insurance space through its advanced classification of risk,” per the release.

“We look forward to learning from one another through our strategic partnership, providing high value-added products and services to customers of both companies in the U.S. and Japan, and to continue to support Hippo, which quickly became a top insurtech in the U.S. home insurance space and is beloved by its customers,” he said.

Hippo also raised $150 million in July, which brought its valuation to $1.5 billion at that time. And in June, the company entered into a deal to purchase Spinnaker Insurance Co., a national property and casualty insurer.