We dive deep into our sectors. Our research drives our insights and thesis-driven approach.

Nine years ago, I was finishing up business school at Columbia, doing just about anything I could to break into VC full-time. I was interning at two firms (Bowery Capital and Foundation Capital) and volunteered to be Co-President of the schools PE/VC Club. I went to business school for a singular purpose, to break into VC, and wanted to exhaust every last opportunity I could to make that happen. For many (even our own career services department), it seemed that my transition into VC just wasn’t going to happen.

We’re proud to announce our investment in MVMNT, a platform to democratize access to software for freight shippers and brokers, and to congratulate them on their $20m Series A with A16Z One of our core insights at Equal is the revealed low willingness to pay for software by non-digitally native industry buyers, despite incredible ROI. We’ve seen time and time again that a healthy value proposition simply isn’t enough to convince customers, especially at the long-tail of the market where they lack the budget, cashflow and technology acumen, to invest in digital transformation. One of our prevailing approaches to these conditions is to offer a core system on a freemium basis and to identify an alternative means of monetization that attacks other cost centers, stealing wallet share from other analog service providers, rather than increasing their existing (IT) costs.

Every year, I attend InsureTech Connect (ITC), the largest gathering of insurance innovators on the planet. I’ve been speaking at the conference since its very first year and it’s been amazing to see its growth over the last few years. This year brought together nearly 10,000+ from over 50 countries and I was fortunate to share the stage with some incredible panelists (including Bill Pieroni, CEO of ACORD, Arun Balakrishnan, CEO of Xceedance, Farooq Sheikh, Global Head of Insurance at Unqork and Jillian Slyfield, Chief Innovation Officer at Aon) to discuss “The Future of Commercial Insurance Broking”. While there were some great take aways from the panel, learnings from the conference as a whole included:

At Equal, we love partnering with founders that are building verticalized software platforms. We believe that there are many markets and sectors that have important nuances that horizontal solutions are unable to fully capture, and the restaurant industry is no exception. Over the past decade, online restaurant ordering and delivery have exploded in popularity. As demand grew, delivery service platforms like Grubhub, Doordash, and UberEats gained prominence, with the promise of streamlining delivery operations and helping restaurants find new customers.

The last decade has undoubtedly seen one of the most fundamental changes to the benefits ecosystem in known history. While the long-term impacts of the pandemic on our healthcare system are still unknown, we’ve also seen a continued (and unrelated) evolution of the way healthcare and other benefits are funded. Given a highly competitive employment environment and rising healthcare costs, the benefits market has needed to evolve. With the adoption of the Affordable Care Act, we’ve seen the industry’s cost structure continue to evolve even more, further incentivizing employers to self-fund and identify creative ways to cut costs while expanding coverage. The benefits industry of today is so radically different from the cookie cutter plans of the past, that we’re referring to this newly formed dynamic as Benefits 2.0.