Retrospective: WeFox, a company based in Berlin, is the best financed insurance company in Europe since its creation in 2015. The only company on the old continent that has raised more than one billion euros, the new insurance company offers platform to manage your own insurance policies after having for a period mainly been positioned as support for brokers via automated processes – today it has around 3,000 partner brokers. For image purposes, it has also partnered with three football clubs: AC Milan, Union Berlin and Young Boys Bern.
The premises of fear from 2021
But success story experienced the first setbacks from 2021. Already before reversal of interest, Questions have hovered over its model, mirroring the disappointments of the rare other insurtechs that have raised as much funding across the Atlantic as Hippo or Root.
From bad to worse, after a first wave of redundancies revealed in 2023, WeFox ended up changing management with the retirement of its founder Julian Teicke in March 2024, whereby we removed certain activities in its two core markets, which are ‘ Germany and Switzerland (especially in cars and homes) and in light of increasing risk of insolvencyhad finally reached a new round of financing in bridge of 20 million euros last May, led by the British fund Chrysalis – after several similar campaigns in recent months.
A fight between shareholders
Except the story doesn’t end there. After weeks of rumours, the main shareholder in WeFox was Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund Mubadala (which led the last major funding round of the insurtech in 2022), would have offered to sell its shares to British broker Ardonagh, notes Bloomberg. An operation rejected by the founders of WeFox.
The problem behind these problems: profitability. With up to 1,500 employees, WeFox has already sold some of it, where revenue certainly grew, but the results were still in the red. The size of prizes WeFox Insurance (formerly One) has thus increased according to its latest Solvency and Financial Condition Report (SFCR) from 195.9 to 236.9 million euros between 2022 and 2023, but at the same time its net profit, which is still negative, has increased from 29.9 to 40.5 million euros.
The company currently provides approx two million people, operating in eight countries, but “especially” in four (Germany and Switzerland, which are the two countries of origin of WeFox under the name FinanceFox, but also Italy and Poland). Its headquarters are in Liechtenstein and it also has operations in Austria, Spain and France since the end of 2021.
