NEXT INSURANCE

The founders were not insurance people. Guy Goldstein, Nissim Tapiro and Alon Huri had just sold their last company.

That was Check, a bill-paying app that Intuit bought for $360 million in 2014. Looking for the next broken market, they landed on small business insurance.

A plumber or a food truck owner trying to buy a policy faced weeks of phone calls, faxed forms and agents who did not really want the account. The trio figured software could do the same job in minutes.

They launched Next in 2016 and sold policies straight to owners online.

Next sells insurance to small businesses. Think general liability, workers comp and commercial auto for the plumber, the landscaper or the yoga studio.

An owner answers a few questions on the site and gets a quote in about ten minutes. No agent.

No fax machine. Next collects the premium and takes on the risk, backed by reinsurance partners.

It makes money the way any insurer does. It keeps the difference between the premiums it collects and the claims it pays.

The core product is a bundle of small business coverage sold in one place. General liability protects against the customer who slips and sues.

Workers compensation covers employees who get hurt on the job. There is also professional liability, commercial auto and tools and equipment cover.

Owners can buy a live certificate of insurance instantly. That matters because clients and landlords often demand proof before any work can start.

Next went narrow on purpose. Instead of chasing every insurance buyer, it built products for specific trades.

More than 1,000 of them. A cleaning company sees a policy written for cleaning companies.

That focus let Next write coverage fast and price it well. It also leaned hard on partnerships, plugging its insurance into places small owners already were.

By 2022 revenue had climbed to around $800 million.

Selling insurance online is easy. Making money on it is not.

Insurtech is littered with companies that grew fast and bled cash because their pricing was wrong and claims ran hot. Next had to prove it could actually underwrite, not just market.

It also raised at a $4 billion valuation in 2021, right before the whole sector cooled off. The final proof was the exit price.

Munich Re paid $2.6 billion, well under that peak.

Next raised more than $1.1 billion from a mix of tech and insurance money. Early backers included Ribbit Capital, Redpoint Ventures, TLV Partners and Zeev Ventures.

Munich Re Ventures came in on the Series C. That turned out to be an early sign of where this would all end.

Later rounds pulled in giants like Battery Ventures, Capital G, Allstate and Allianz X. When Munich Re bought the company outright in 2025, those insurance backers turned a strategic bet into a full takeover.