The latest travel insurance policy designs from Battleface Inc. extend coverage whether a tourist is 100 miles from home, or headed to outer space.
Someone willing to pay $450,000 for a seat now can get coverage if weather delays or cancels a launch, or if the worst happens on a flight. Battleface announced this month it's ready to offer custom space-travel policies.
But terrestrial insurance is what's causing skyrocketing growth for the startup since it moved to Columbus from the UK at the beginning of the year, following a $12 million investment from Drive Capital LLC.
Thousands of travelers have bought policies, averaging about 25 days, with some months seven times bigger than the last. Overall revenue is about triple from last year.
Co-founder and CEO Sasha Gainullin credits the rapid growth to the new way of thinking with VC backing and guidance from Drive.
"Before the Series A, I would only make decisions based on (profits)," he said in an interview. "Now I'm making decisions based on growth and scalability and investment into the future."
Battleface now has 73 employees, up from 20 in December. Most of the hiring has been in Central Ohio, although staff are mostly working remotely with drop-ins at Drive's Short North offices.
It's also getting repeat customers, some of them frequent travelers who have requested annual coverage that can be occasionally tweaked by trip.
At the business's heart is data science that allows travelers seamlessly to choose specific types of coverage at affordable premiums, like protection for damage to a surfboard instead of a suitcase. Ratings differ by destination – U.S. medical costs are much higher than elsewhere – or planned activity, like cliff-diving.
Founded by veterans of the travel insurance industry, Battleface is tackling an overlooked specialty market. Traditional insurers are stuck with one-size-fits-all policies developed in the 1980s, Gainullin said, when the expectation was booking a cruise through a travel agency. So exclusions meant claims were denied for terrorist bombings, hurricanes or pandemics.
"We were solving the problem for journalists, but at the time it turned out to be a problem for every traveler," Gainullin said.
"We were the only company offering Covid-19 benefits (such as cancellation for a positive test)," he said. "Our system is properly rating for the risk, and customers are loving it."
As a result, the startup was named the International Travel & Health Insurer of the Year in 2020 by the International Travel & Health Insurance Journal.
Adventure tourism is the fastest-growing travel category, Gainullin said. Vacation rentals now offer bookings of local tour guides.
Battleface designs plans but doesn't underwrite them, instead sharing premiums with the carriers, starting with Lloyd's of London in Europe. Its U.S. underwriter is Spinnaker Insurance of New Jersey, and it recently added Crum & Forster SPC to extend to countries outside the 56 it had operated in. And it has a new partner to enter Canada.
Because Spinnaker already is licensed, Battleface needs state approvals for plan designs and rates, a speedier process. It's awaiting launch in California, New York and Connecticut.
Co-founder and CTO Anthony Spiteri comes from Tangiers Insurance Services, an insurance intermediary from which Gainullin developed Battleface in 2017.
Lloyd's underwrites the space coverage. The third co-founder and Managing Director Paul Simmonds previously was a Lloyd's underwriter – and a lot of his work was calculating cargo risk for NASA and its subcontractors.
Several companies have announced plans for space tourism, including Elon Musk’s SpaceX, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, and high-tech balloon manufacturer Space Perspective, which sister paper Orlando Business Journal reports has plans for the first bar in space. Virgin is grounded for now, but ticket prices for a proposed fall flight had been soaring, according to sister paper Albuquerque Business First.
Gainullin has moved to Columbus from northern Virginia, and Spiteri to Gahanna from Malta.
"I could talk all day long on how the transition has been so easy," Gainullin said. "Drive made it easy."
