Greg Barats, president and CEO of Germany-based reinsurer Munich Re’s US subsidiary HSB Group, made a smart decision when he founded its strategic corporation venture fund – he brought in Jacqueline LeSage Krause to run it.
Barats said: “Engaging companies with the most current technologies and business models accelerates our execution and future growth. Jacqueline and the Munich Re/HSB Ventures team have been instrumental in the development of HSB’s IoT strategy and an ecosystem around it of investments and pilots.”
As managing director of Munich Re/HSB Ventures, LeSage Krause has since late 2014 accelerated a typical corporate venturing launch process by dint of her experience.
She was vice-president of innovation and corporate venture capital at US-based insurer Hartford Financial Services Group but left in 2012 after four years as the company embarked on a restructuring plan to sell a number of businesses and focus on the core.
She had been responsible for both internal innovation – incubating new offerings, customer experiences, and business models – through the Innovation Studio and external innovation – investing venture capital in startups and forming strategic alliances – through Hartford Ventures. LeSage Krause had founded Hartford Ventures after being founder and CEO of a digital video startup and six years as a consultant with AT Kearney.
Now based in San Francisco for Munich Re/HSB Ventures, she is investing in “early to late-stage innovation that drives HSB’s long-term vision and strategy”.
She told GCV in a question time with Andrew Gaule: “We are responsible for corporate venturing activities that deliver both strategic and financial value through minority investments, business partnerships, and, in some cases, acquisitions.
“The focus is to grow our business by leveraging new technology-enabled products, services and data to serve our customers, to enable new insurance growth platforms, and to identify insurance gaps in the startup ecosystem.”
Since then, her group has expanded beyond HSB to the rest of Munich Re, bringing with it an expansion of both scale and scope, including insurance tech in Europe and the US. Last year, Munich Re/HSB Ventures added to a $7m round for Augury, a predictive maintenance company, and also invested in Waygum, another company in the IoT sector.
Last month, it participated in a $20m series B round for another IoT technology provider, Helium, that was led by GV and included Khosla Ventures.
And talent attracts talent. LeSage Krause hired Matt McElhattan, who had been active in corporate venturing for more than a decade before his move last summer to join Munich Re/HSB Ventures. McElhattan was named a GCV Rising Star 2016 in January. This year, Amir Kabir joined from Presidio Ventures, having previously been an investment associate at Route 66 Ventures covering insurance tech, and LeSage Krause is looking to expand into London.
She said she was working on the “first non-HSB-related investment, which is based in Europe, so will also be our first deal outside the US”.
LeSage Krause said she was most proud of having had a “significant strategic impact on HSB’s IoT strategy, HSB and Munich Re’s approach to enabling insurance tech startups globally, and Munich Re’s partnership with epidemic-risk startup Metabiota for the company’s life insurance and China businesses”.
Next, it is “scaling to handle increased volume and geography of deals and additional strategic areas for both HSB and Munich Re”.