Joshu is an insurance product development and distribution platform. They seek to help insurance product owners configure, launch and update their products without coding. Andrew Daniels sat with Co-Founder and CEO, Roy Mill, to learn more about how Joshu is impacting the industry.

What is Joshu’s client focus?
We are catering to Property & Casualty carriers and MGAs, especially in specialty lines.
What does your product do?
The product is a policy-admin system that’s configurable by non-technical people. Most policy-admin systems require IT teams to build on top of them. As founders who came from an MGA that launched a cyber insurance product, we realized that the handoffs between IT and the business were tough. There was a lot of back and forth, so we decided to wrap this process into a nice interface that allows an insurance product owner who's not technical to use the assets they already have to configure their product on the platform.
How much capital have you raised?
We have raised a little over $8 million to date.
Was the company born from within or outside the industry?
Joshu was born from inside the industry, but it's also a hybrid. My Co-Founder and I are tech people. He was in different telecom, fintechs and software companies. I'm actually an economist by background and worked as a product manager for ancestry.com. Three years before we started Joshu, we worked for a cyber insurance startup, so we have a few years of experience in the industry.
What growth metrics have you accomplished over the last 12 months?
We're growing fast by adding new insurers to the platform. Revenue has tripled in the past 12 months, and the nice thing is the platform scales. It's not something that requires a lot of hours of customization to build something that’s specific to this use case. The platform is flexible and extendable to tackle multiple types of insurance products.
Within your domain, what is the current challenge that the industry is facing?
I'll start with how the industry designs insurance products. Many people are seeing the Lemonades, the Hippos, the Next Insurances coming out with simple flows of offering and distributing insurance products, but it’s easy to forget the complexity of these insurance products that these flows use. How do you take a product with rigorous information requirements for underwriting and build a simple application for? Sometimes you can call third-party data systems to fill in the gaps, but in many cases you still need more information, which makes the application form longer and harder, hindering distribution. The tradeoff between more rigorous underwriting on one hand and minimizing friction in distribution on the other hand is a key reason for building native digital distribution into Joshu and putting the insurance product owner in charge of both.
The other challenge is between IT and the business. How do you quickly get to market? How do you get the resources and guide them in building your dream product? It takes a few months to make the case for the ROI for putting four to eight engineers on your project. They come in, and you need to train them and tell them about the product. They may build it and come back with something you didn’t want. This whole process is really heavy and expensive from a time and cost perspective. The industry isn't moving as fast as it could if it had better, more streamlined tools to get those products out.
How does Joshu take a unique approach to providing value?
We basically built Shopify for insurance. Insurance products are more complex than the products people put on Shopify but the concept is the same: instead of building digital underwriting and distribution “from scratch,” we took care of all these flows. You, as the insurance product owner, only need to define how your insurance product works. You can prototype and test it with your brokers with a random sample of insured. You can get early feedback: Is this something you can use? What are the tough questions to answer? The insurance product owner can define this from the convenience of your laptop without all of these heavy armies of developers that you would otherwise need to bring with you.
What inspired the team to start this company?
My co-founder and I came from cyber insurance where I led the software Product Management and he led the engineers, each feeling frustrated with the current process of building and changing products. Our insurance product owners came from places where changing underwriting rules—for example, not writing a certain class of business for the next three months—meant changing an Excel template that the underwriters would then update in their Excel-based underwriting. When your underwriting is Excel-based, making changes to the rules is almost instantaneous. But, when we automated the underwriting process, every change had to go through us, so we would update the code accordingly. That made changes much slower than they were used to, and we felt we had to find a better, easier and faster way to launch and to make changes to products on one end and see the underwriting instantaneously adapt.
Can you share any goals for the next 12 months?
We want to engage with more insurers who feel that it's taking too long to go to market and can’t iterate on the product to make it in the market. We would like to help our existing customers launch even more products and help new insurers. I see exciting new products every week. We have this thing called the Century Club where we celebrate clients who were able to launch in less than 100 days. It’s a celebration of both Joshu and the client, since it’s not easy to get all the pieces of the insurance product together quickly. It's not just the technology. The insurer needs to have all of their ducks in a row. They need to have the rating proper, all the form proper, all kinds of decisions to make. If they make good decisions quickly and get all the stakeholders moving along, they can launch fast. I want to meet as many insurance product owners as possible, and I want to make them successful by taking control of their destiny.