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December 2, 2021

Meet the French startup making insurance companies pay up

Lyanne has so far recovered €100k of insurance that consumers would otherwise have missed out on


Freya Pratty

3 min read

Lyanne cofounders Li Cai and Jeanne Depond

Insurance documents aren’t the most fun thing to read. In fact, a recent study in France suggested only about 27% of people read them before they sign.

“That means it’s hard for people to know what they’re covered for, simply because they haven’t read through the terms in detail,” says Li Cai, cofounder of French startup Lyanne. 

“It’s also a really complicated process to make a claim if you do have one, so a lot of people miss out on compensation,” she says. Cai says that, in France, there are 13m insurance claims a year that go unpaid by insurers, amounting to €40bn.

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Cai’s startup, Lyanne, wants to change that. It uses tech to help consumers understand their insurance rights, make claims and to generally redress the balance between insurers and policyholders. 

It is similar to the many flight delay compensation companies, like AirHelp and FairPlane, that sprang up over the last decade to help consumers claim compensation for delayed flights. 

Lots of people are trying to sell insurance, but the problem now is people not understanding what the insurance means

Lyanne, which launched last year, has just secured the backing of Brent Hoberman’s investment fund Firstminute Capital to help expand the insurtech business. 

The firm has backed Lyanne in a €1.2m seed round, alongside 50Partners and several angel investors: Thierry Petit from Showroomprivé, Nicolas Chartier from Aramis Auto and Benjamin Gaignault from Ornikar.

How it works

“Lots of people are trying to sell insurance, but the problem now is people not understanding what the insurance means,” says Cai.

Lyanne’s digital platform revolves around two main services. The first is a free claim management tool, where people can answer a series of questions about their claim and Lyanne will tell them exactly what steps they need to do — and what not to do.

The second part of the service — the paid part — is that Lyanne handles all the paperwork for a claim. The system analyses the file and, if it determines there’s a chance of compensation, it’ll launch the claim on behalf of the client.

Lyanne takes 15% of the compensation as commission. Cai says people are willing to pay because they're usually insurance claims that they have already failed once, and people are keen to get anything they can back. The company says it has recovered €100k in compensation so far.

The company offers one other tool — a free service that allows people to aggregate their insurance policies together to understand any holes in their coverage.

The Lyanne team is relatively small, with just seven people, but they plan to recruit 15 more staff in early 2022, and the team at present includes some interesting people — including a head of growth who helped organise for Emmanuel Macron’s En Marche party. 

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Freya Pratty

Freya Pratty is a senior reporter at Sifted. She covers climate tech, writes our weekly Climate Tech newsletter and works on investigations. Follow her on X and LinkedIn