Sam Evans: From Investment Thesis to Strategic Partnerships

On this episode, Sabine VdL interviews Sam Evans, a Founding Partner with Eos Venture Partners, who has spent the last four years investing in InsurTech startups. He is an active speaker and a top 50 InsurTech influencer.  Prior to establishing Eos, Sam was a partner at KPMG, where he led the Global Deal Advisory insurance practice. During his career, Sam has worked on over $75bn of insurance-related transactions and has worked in many of the large, mature, and high-growth insurance markets around the globe. Sam lived in great places, including Australia, Hong Kong, and Switzerland. Today, Sam lives in the UK. KEY TAKEAWAYS There’s so much happening, it’s a super exciting time. One of the key areas for us at Eos is the digital and gig economies. First, it’s difficult to properly serve the gig economy worker with traditional insurance solutions because they’re not usage-based, not connected, and often backwards-looking. Still, the gig economy worker has become a huge and growing market, especially on the back of the pandemic. It’s also underserved. Second, the ability to transition from protection to prevention within life and health, leveraging technology to proactively manage risk and embed medical, health, and fitness technologies to prevent the deterioration of conditions. Third, consider emerging risk classes, such as cybersecurity risk, combined with embedded insurance mechanisms; these new risk classes are increasingly entering the market. The pandemic has accelerated the industry’s adoption of ‘digital’ by at least 5 years, which is quite staggering. Demand from pretty much all our portfolio companies has increased significantly, so we’re seeing it in real-time. The industry’s maturity has also accelerated; overall fundraising levels are increasing, but they’re increasingly dominated by a smaller number of companies making larger rounds. The first half of 2021 saw more funding than the whole of 2020, so we’re still on a very significant upwards trajectory in terms of appetite and capital flowing in. We are in an environment with inflated valuations, too. The InsurTech bubble hasn’t burst yet. It’s deflating, though, and this may not necessarily be a bad thing. It’s all part of the maturing journey of a sector.  There’s a significant amount of capital looking to be deployed against excellent business models. We’re always keen to talk to companies that are either on the path to or have reached the series A stage. If you look at the market as a whole, we’re at least 10 years behind FinTech in development, so we’re still at a very early stage of development. This is going to dominate the industry for the next 20-30 years. This is a fundamental change and shift in how insurance operates. BEST MOMENTS ‘Key to our philosophy is working in partnership with the industry, rather than adopting a pure challenger model, which is where we saw the greatest value could be created.’ ‘Connected vehicle insurance enhances safety by improving driving quality and highlighting accident hotspots. Insurers today get better results as they can use the data to enhance risk selection and pricing.’ ‘A lot of InsurTech startups are going to struggle and fail. That’s part of the natural evolution of a sector. I think Covid-19 has accelerated that to a certain degree due to the fight for quality, and the lookout for those startups that are likely to do particularly well.’ ‘Incumbents shouldn’t see regulation as something that’s going to protect them from new entrants. We’ve seen, even in our small portfolio, companies moving from an MGA into a full-stack model with the blessing of the regulator.’ ABOUT THE GUEST Sam Evans is a founding partner of Eos Venture Partners, a Strategic InsurTech Venture Capital fund with offices in London and Philadelphia. Eos is an independent specialist InsurTech investment and advisory business. Eos is today a Series A and Series B investor with a focus on new business models and new technologies that will impact and transform the insurance industry. Eos provides financing and advisory services to leading entrepreneurs building innovative insurance businesses. In partnership with RAW Capital Partners, Eos offers a unique solution for growth-stage InsurTech companies. Founders are choosing to work with Eos because it is an independent specialist and active InsurTech investor with a strong track record and excellent relationships across the insurance sector. ABOUT THE HOST Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and trust. On Scouting for Growth, she decodes how real growth happens—where capital, collaboration, and courage meet. If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights. And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at [email protected]