Scout InsurTech Interview with PLACECovr

PLACECovr is an innovative InsurTech company with a new protection product known as location insurance. Chris Luiz sat down with Co-Founders Diane Coogan-Pushner and Robert Clark to discuss how PLACECovr is revolutionizing the way property insurance is offered.

Who are your clients?

We serve people who are tied to where they live. These are homeowners who don’t want to move or cannot just pack up and leave when their town starts going in the wrong direction. This includes people with jobs that require them to stay put, parents with school age children,  retirees who want to stay close to family, AirBnb owners and other landlords. 

We’re working closely with independent insurance agents, and in Southern New England alone, we have partners with access to over 150,000 homeowners’ policies. We’re also actively exploring distribution through digital agencies. The product can slot into employee benefits packages, be offered at the point of mortgage origination or through wealth advisors. It really fits in wherever people are making long-term financial decisions.

What does your product do?

Our product is a parametric insurance policy that protects homeowners financially when their town declines, when taxes rise, schools get worse or crime increases. It’s not about the home’s value or physical condition; it’s about protecting the homeowner’s wallet from long-term damage. Even though it’s an annual policy, the payout reflects the perpetual cost of something like a tax hike. For example, if your tax burden rises by $1,000 a year, we calculate that in present value terms as a $10,000 loss and respond accordingly.

It’s fully parametric and driven by TownScores and StateScores, which we license from a company we founded that’s now a third-party. These are data metrics that reflect real taxpayer impact. Pricing is based entirely on the location, not personal data, and we’ve designed the policy to be simple for both agents and customers.

How much capital have you raised?

We haven’t publicly disclosed a specific amount, but we’re actively seeking capital right now. We’re participating in investor showcases, having conversations with VCs and capacity providers and laying the groundwork for strategic partnerships. We’re ready to scale and are looking for the right capital partners to grow with us.

Was the company born from within or outside the industry?

It definitely came from within. I (Diane) started at AT&T doing analytics on 100 million customers, then moved into insurance at Swiss Re doing structured reinsurance transactions and then to Navigators as Chief Risk Officer. Bob had real-life experience dealing with town decline and financial fallout in Rhode Island after selling his business. We both came at the problem from different perspectives: mine was data and risk management, while his was lived experience. We arrived at the same insight: people insure everything except their location. That’s a massive gap, and we built this company to fill it.

What growth metrics have you accomplished over the last 12 months?

Over the last year, we finalized the spoon-out of the taxpayer-centric data infrastructure we’d been building for over five years. We signed on ten independent agencies who are ready to sell our product. We’ve secured capacity with Prime Insurance and laid the foundation for additional layers through the London market. On the distribution front, we’ve been actively engaging with digital platforms and affinity partners to broaden our reach. We’re now moving into launch mode, and we’ll be selling in Florida as our test market.

Within your domain, what is the current challenge that the industry is facing?

The biggest challenge is that homeowners are financially exposed to local and state government decline, but they have no way to protect themselves. Municipal data is fragmented, hard to access and often completely incomprehensible to the average person. Credit ratings focus on bondholders, not taxpayers, so people are flying blind. They don’t see tax hikes, underfunded pensions or deteriorating infrastructure coming until it’s too late. We’re fixing that by making municipal risk visible and insurable.

How does PLACECovr take a unique approach to providing value?

We’ve created a brand-new data layer that focuses on what matters to taxpayers. TownScore and StateScore evaluate taxes, school quality, crime and unfunded liabilities relative to income. This is all in a way that reflects the resident’s experience, not the bondholder’s. That powers a parametric insurance policy that’s easy to sell, easy to understand and doesn’t require personal data. Since we were part of the data company’s founding, we know there’s no centralized source of information that rivals TownScoreReport.com. And because we have an exclusive and evergreen license for the data, it’s our moat, and it positions us as the first and only player in a brand-new insurance category.

What inspired the team to start this company?

It started at a cocktail party, believe it or not. We were talking about how so many friends and family were moving away from places like New York and Connecticut because of taxes, crime and declining services. Bob had experienced it personally. His town in Rhode Island sold off its wastewater treatment plant, taxes were doubling and he was paying for private school because the public schools weren’t safe. I had seen it from the municipal risk side during the financial crisis, and I knew the data didn’t exist in a way that served the taxpayer. We both realized the same thing: location risk is real, and it’s unprotected. That conversation became the foundation for our company.

Can you share any goals for the next 12 months?

In the next year, we’re launching the product in five pilot states through regional agency partners. We’ll be testing and refining the product while gathering real-world performance data. We also plan to expand distribution via digital platforms and benefit providers. On the product side, we’re exploring higher coverage limits and new applications for commercial property owners. We’re raising capital to support all of this, and our broader goal is to make location insurance a standard line of coverage. This is something people expect to see alongside homeowners, pet or flood insurance.

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