Launch HN: Tint (YC W21) – Embed insurance into any product

[mriolfi]

Hi HN! We’re Matheus & Jérôme and we’re the co-founders of Tint(http://www.tint.ai). We help companies add insurance to their products.

Many companies, such as marketplaces, merchants, and travel agents could include insurance as part of their products and services to make them more valuable to their customers. For example, insurance will be included when you rent a campervan for a weekend trip at Outdoorsy, to protect you if anything goes wrong. Our platform provides everything that is needed: software, access to insurers, compliance—everything required to manage risk and protect users, profitably.

We met in 2014 when we were early employees at Turo, the car-sharing startup. While there, we saw the potential that insurance products have and also saw how hard it was to fully capitalize on it. Turo has an obvious and pressing need for insurance, but to fill it, they had to build their own systems, find insurers to back the program, and ensure compliance with state laws. None of this was their core business. We got inspired by the problem and by the opportunity to solve it, so we decided to create Tint.

Here is a real example from Riders Share, one of our clients: you go to their website/app to rent a motorbike for the weekend and find an awesome Harley Davidson. You proceed to checkout, see a few protection/insurance options, select one, and book the trip. You won't notice, but Riders Share's app has used Tint to risk-score the transaction, decide if it should be confirmed, and calculate how much the protection should cost.

Now, imagine you are a developer working on this project and need to add insurance to the product. What do you do? Instead of reinventing the wheel and adding more lines of code to maintain, you can leverage our APIs to integrate all the touchpoints required to sell insurance to your users (risk selection, quotes, issuing policy, claims, …). All the logic for the API responses is configured from our app so your insurance team can easily iterate on the next versions of your insurance product. Oh, and we also train machine learning models so we can recommend ways to improve its performance.

We're live in production and have helped our clients embed hundreds of thousands of insurance policies. While our tech applies to any insurance use case, we are initially targeting marketplaces that embed insurance.

We'd love to hear any of your ideas or experiences in this space.

Thanks, Matheus + Jérôme

[phonon]

Looking at some of the information you put on Product Hunt, I have significant concerns on your "A/B testing" methods, seen here. [0].

Randomly adjusting pricing to consumers to test for price sensitivity is not a "thing" for a filed insurance product in the US (which I would assume this is/would have to be.) If deviations are allowed in a filing, they are supposed to be risk based. I don't see how this will accomplish anything except getting you shut down.

[0] https://ph-files.imgix.net/e833bdbf-0702-4f3e-99b6-e5312eb96...

[mriolfi]

phonon you are absolutely right. It's not possible to use A/B tests for admitted insurance use cases in the US, and we don't let our clients do so. This tool was designed with non-admitted use cases or non-insurance products, such as waivers, in mind.

Also, the names on the screenshot are illustrative as the client could vary other factors that are not price in the A/B test, like user verification workflows, deductibles offered, etc. The goal is to find the optimal solution that creates value for the company while matching the risk preferences of the users.

[dopeboy]

My first startup was in the equipment sharing space (specifically camera equipment). Back then (in 2013), getting insurance was either going through brokers and spending $ to get them to craft a policy for you. I would have loved something like this that's instant for the end user & plug & play on the business side.

Fantastic idea, good luck.

[jeromesls]

Thanks! Would be awesome to hear more about your experience back then. Feel free to reach out to us through the website if you don't mind.

[jld]

I've always thought Kickstarter should offer insurance that the creator will deliver the products they're selling.

It would be hard to assess risk between all the different kinds of creators/levels of experience delivering/types of products sold, but I think it would be an interesting product for them.

[mriolfi]

That could definitely be explored. The key here, and to other new insurance products is: what unique data is Kickstarter generating about its campaigns that didn't exist before? I bet they have a lot of data on campaign types, product type, how much is being raised, etc, that could be used to assess the risk and eventually price insurance.

The explosion in the volume of data that companies generate will definitely help accelerate innovation in insurance.

[grizzles]

I just flicked an email to the ceo of a company I'm an investor that could become a huge customer.

The thing their customers will want to insure against is fairly bespoke, so they will care about strong terms around non-competition and what happens if they fall afoul of your policies for any reason - eg. good >6 month offboarding terms to figure out what to do if you terminate the relationship for some reason.

[jeromesls]

Thanks! we'd love to learn more about the use case and provide a more detailed overview of the solutions we can bring here. Feel free to ping us on the website and we can take it from there.

[p2hari]

In a rising circular economy this comes as a much needed product. Some questions or suggestions to add 1. Which countries is it operational 2. Does this mean as a developer I need to collect more information from end user ( KYC requirements) 3. Are claims going to be handled through us or the insurance? 4. Some links to docs because it is developer focussed :)

[jeromesls]

Great questions! 1. we are operational worldwide and our team team has launched insurance products across multiple countries. In the US, we are a licensed broker and work with partners in other countries. 2. yes, there might be additional information to be collected for underwriting purposes. But the good news is that our platform has pre-built integrations with the main datasources for KYC so this process happens behind the scenes for you and we do the heavy-duty work of maintaining these integrations on your behalf. 3. it depends on the insurance product, we can support both. a lot of our customers handle claims in house as they care about controlling the end to end experience when it comes to their users. 4. For sure, https://docs.tint.ai - feedback welcome!

[tixocloud]

Congrats on the launch. Interesting offering and maybe a fit for my startup.

What kind of insurance products could you underwrite? Would it be possible to underwrite credit/loan related insurances?

[jeromesls]

Thanks for your message. We are pretty much insurance product agnostic, we'd be happy to get more details about your use case. Please ping us via the website https://www.tint.ai

[razin]

Congrats on the launch, Matheus and Jérôme! How are you differentiating Tint from other embedded insurance APIs like Sure and Boost?

[mriolfi]

Thanks! Our platform gives full control to the users, from setting up their product, to deciding which insurers to use, to running A/B tests with different pricing logics to optimize profitability. Think of us as the infrastructure/OS that helps the risk teams do their job better.

Boost/Sure are good services, but they don't provide the same level of transparency and control. They work more like agencies/outsourcing than insurance infrastructure

[nikunjverma]

Mind boggling idea. Thinking of how it could apply to the marketplaces that offer non physical goods.

[mriolfi]

Hi nikunjverma, it can definitely be done. For instance, a marketplace that connects software developers/designers with companies could offer professional liability as part of the offering.

Can you think of other ideas?

[phonon]

How does this differ from https://www.qover.com/ ?

Are you acting as a pure software vendor, or as a licensed entity?

[mriolfi]

We are a combination of software + marketplace (i.e. licensed insurance broker that provides full transparency to the clients).

Qover is cool, the overall concept is similar to ours. It looks like they don't allow the companies to customize the insurance products, our platform can provide more tailor-made products

[radihuq]

This looks really useful! Is it available in Canada?

[mriolfi]

The software part is available anywhere, and we have clients in the US, Canada, Europe and Australia.

We are only licensed as insurance brokers in the US, so we would have to work with partners in Canada and other countries to secure the insurance policy.

[instaheat]

I think this is a game changer. Well done!

[jeromesls]

Thanks!

[taivare]

Your company logo is cool!

[jeromesls]

Thanks! We tried to represent different Tints on it :)

[tln]

I worked at another startup called Tint - doing social media walls (www.tintup.com).

Mildly curious -- how did you pick the name?

Cool concept & best of luck

[jabo]

Oh hey, Tint (up) was the first thing that came to my mind as well!

Now I’m curious too.

[rchiba]

Same, I thought of Tint(up) :)

[jedgardyson]

Congrats guys!

[jolewy]

Parabéns

[bberenberg]

Link?

[mriolfi]

We're at http://www.tint.ai

[jeromesls]

oops! https://www.tint.ai

[ChrisKong]

Look forward to learn more about company, Mattheus.