Root Insurance raises $100M for a $1B valuation | Hacker News Reader

Root Insurance raises $100M for a $1B valuation

techcrunch.com

22 pointskaboro13 comments

Looks like another "cherry-pick your customer" fin-tech startup. They do extremely well in the first stages of growth, but exhaust the potential market pretty fast and then go into turmoil when the VC's rightfully demand growth. With CAC in hundreds of dollars, the well dries up fast. I would be delighted to see them break this barrier and flourish.

So drive slow for 1-3 weeks every time you want a new discount and then drive normal. If this literally dropped my insurance by $600+/yr (I pay over $1200/yr for one car) then I'm totally down... I wonder how they determine your risk. Mainly speed and g-forces I'd guess. So just use typical efficient driving techniques (large buffer in front of you to avoid using the brakes, accelerate slowly, prefer constant speed vs varying) and then go slow through turns while observing all speed limits.

Kind of doubt they do this discount for certain cars or demographics tho. Young men, basically.

God I'd love this for motorcycle insurance. S1000RR goes from $4k+/yr to insure to 2k. Woo!

I wouldn't be surprised if the most useful features were things like time of day driven, total time driving, locations driven to, etc. Those are also more annoying to game than g-force etc. Of course, using some of those might be a recipe for a discrimination lawsuit.

Root's approach to analyzing driving patterns is on their website: https://www.joinroot.com/test-drive

- Braking

- Hours

- Turns

- Consistency

Speed is notably absent.

Aviva here has it's Drive App, you need to drive 200 miles to get a score from 1 to 10 which discounts your premium, though they only go up to 28% discount vs. 50% from Root.

https://www.aviva.co.uk/car-insurance/drive/

meta note: this is one of the worst written articles on techcrunch I've ever seen.

I visit the site only through random links from HN, but if this is the median article quality these days...

Anyone know how this compares to Metromile? I see a lot of my friends who have cars in San Francisco switching to that and saving money.

Aside: I thought this was going to be about cybersecurity insurance. Root insurance would be a great name, and I think that's an industry that should see a huge amount of growth in the near future.

Oops, I thought it said Robot Insurance raises $100M.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXnL7sdElno

Does anyone use Root? Do you need to leave the app on constantly while you drive?

I interviewed there in 2016 and you only needed to have the app on while driving for a week or two before you got a quote. After you got the quote you didn't need to have the app on. It's possible this has changed since then; but back when I spoke with them they were clearly trying to balance collecting the telemetry needed to give good discounts with the natural privacy concerns.

Hey Lionel! I bet they have a lot of Braintree alums interviewing there. Dan is great to work with.

Also, we should catch up!

The app runs in the background, you don't have to have it open/active.

inb4 RootInsuranceDiscountGuide.com and the value proposition diminishes to 0

Reply on news.ycombinator.com