Moving country involves a peculiar kind of subtraction. You bring your skills, your habits and your years behind the wheel. Then a form asks for your British driving history, and a substantial part of your adult life appears to vanish. For Alexander Kent-Braham, that gap between a person’s experience and an insurer’s assessment became the opening for a company.
The starting point was a conversation about an expensive car insurance quote. A friend who had moved to Britain was struggling to get an affordable deal. Alexander, his identical twin Oliver and software engineer David Goaté began examining a market in which an experienced driver could arrive from overseas and be treated as an unfamiliar risk. They founded Marshmallow in 2017.
Their answer depended on taking a fuller account of the driver. Experience acquired elsewhere could matter. A financial service could be built around the people who fell awkwardly between its existing categories. There was a business proposition inside that irritation, provided the founders could turn a reasonable complaint into insurance that worked.
Alexander had already encountered the assumptions surrounding those customers. In a 2019 essay, he recalled an insurance director dismissing the idea of a company focused on migrants. The objection stayed with him. His writing connected the commercial opportunity to a broader conviction: financial services should make it easier for people to build lives across borders.
An office with unusually good changing rooms
Marshmallow’s first workplace was the lobby of a Virgin Active gym. Membership supplied an economical combination of somewhere to sit, internet access and facilities most fledgling companies would struggle to put in an office budget. An insurer born beside a gym reception has a certain comic fitness: the founders were trying to get an old industry to move.
The arrangement lasted for months. Insurance veteran Tim Holliday joined the early group without initially taking a salary. The business needed technical capability and insurance knowledge alongside the twins’ commercial interests. Goaté was central to that mix; all three founders had previously worked at the digital identity company Yoti.
Alexander’s route there included a year as an analyst at Quality Capital Management, a systematic hedge fund in Surrey. He subsequently worked in product at Yoti. The jobs put finance and digital products on the same CV before Marshmallow brought them together in a much more demanding form.
Earlier, he and Oliver had pursued tennis, attended Reed’s School and gone on to the University of the West of England in Bristol. Their youthful enterprise also included retrieving golf balls from a lake and selling them. A lost ball had a customer waiting for it. Years later, the overlooked item would be somebody’s overseas driving experience. The scale changed rather more than the appeal of an overlooked opportunity.
Two chief executives, different work
Identical twins sharing the chief executive’s job are liable to become a story before either has opened his mouth. In Alexander’s case, the resemblance can obscure the work. By 2021, the brothers described a division in which Oliver handled external matters, including fundraising, while Alexander concentrated on products and internal culture.
That division gives Alexander’s own essays particular interest. He writes about what the company is trying to accomplish and about the machinery needed to accomplish it. His subjects include recruitment, communication, customer conversations and the speed at which somebody receives an answer. The view is often from inside the organisation, looking towards the customer.
A business can gain attention with its proposition. Delivering it requires people to make decisions together, repeatedly, after the proposition has stopped sounding novel. Product and culture meet in those decisions: what gets built, who can challenge it, and whether a frustrated customer becomes a useful signal or another closed conversation.
For Alexander, the job has unfolded alongside two relationships that predate the company. One began at birth; another came through an earlier employer. The three-founder story matters because Marshmallow needed more than an appealing thesis about fairness. Someone had to turn it into software, someone had to understand the insurance, and a growing team had to keep the whole undertaking working.
The numbers he chose to remember
In his review of 2020, published in February 2021, Alexander recorded a customer base that had grown from 12,934 to roughly 50,000. The team had increased from 41 people to 87. Those are recognisable startup figures. The more revealing details arrive further down his account.
He counted customer conversations and response times. At the beginning of the year, a quarter of conversations received a response within two minutes. By the end, the figure exceeded 70 percent. Thirteen people worked outside core hours. There were 387,676 messages across 100,000 customer conversations.
These measurements suggest a useful way to read his responsibilities. Lowering the price gets somebody through the door. Being available afterwards gives that person a reason to trust the arrangement. Insurance remains a promise until somebody needs an answer, at which point the queue becomes a fairly exact expression of the company’s priorities.
Alexander also included the example of an American expatriate who could get to work because Marshmallow had insured him when others would not. The anecdote returned the business to an ordinary consequence: a person could make a journey. Beneath the acquisition figures and recruitment totals, that was the transaction he chose to remember.
An answer in under two minutes
A mission with room for revision
Alexander has been willing to put changes of purpose into public view. In January 2020, he published an explanation of an expanded mission, signed by Oliver, Alexander and David. Helping migrants obtain affordable insurance remained central, but the founders believed their technology could serve other people struggling to get suitable financial products.
The language joined three practical tests: affordability, speed and inclusion. That combination matters. A product can be available in principle and still be too expensive to buy. It can be reasonably priced and maddeningly slow to arrange. Access involves the experience of getting the thing as well as its existence in a catalogue.
In September 2021, Alexander returned to the subject. He described a horizon extending beyond car insurance, with the company eventually protecting more areas of everyday life. His proposed timetable was unusually patient for an industry fond of announcing its next chapter before the ink on the previous one has dried.
“This is something that requires focus for decades.”
Alexander Kent-Braham · 2021
The sentence makes an instructive companion to a funding announcement. It allows ambition to carry a duration, and therefore an obligation. Building useful financial products for a neglected group is work that continues after investors have agreed on what the company might be worth.
A soft name for a serious calculation
Even the company’s name refuses the customary insurance costume. Marshmallow sounds as though it ought to be sold beside a campfire. The founders wanted something memorable in a category whose names could feel interchangeable, and Oliver has said they simply liked the idea of the sweet itself.
The brand later developed with design studio Ragged Edge around the idea of valuing difference. That is a precise fit for a business addressing customers whose backgrounds can make conventional systems less accommodating. The friendly presentation gives the proposition a recognisable face without requiring a prospective customer to take an interest in underwriting.
There is an appealing tension here. Behind the soft name sit pricing models, fraud checks, regulation and claims. A cheerful identity cannot do those jobs. It can, however, make the invitation easier to understand: this company wants to consider experience that has been acquired somewhere else.
What a billion dollars leaves unfinished
In September 2021, Marshmallow raised $85 million at a valuation above $1.25 billion. It became the UK’s second Black-founded unicorn, following WorldRemit, by then part of Zepz. The milestone brought Alexander and Oliver into a much wider conversation about who gets to build and finance a technology company.
The achievement belonged to the founding team and its employees, while carrying significance beyond them. For people looking at British entrepreneurship and wondering whether there was a place for them, the twins supplied a visible example. Visibility, of course, does not remove the work waiting inside the company the following morning.
By 2023, Marshmallow ranked second in the Financial Times’ list of Europe’s fastest-growing companies. Its own history records a further widening of the product range: car finance launched in 2025, followed by home insurance in 2026. A company established around the cost of driving was beginning to address more of the financial arrangements involved in settling into a country.
The $90 million financing announced in April 2025 brought a valuation above $2 billion. Marshmallow reported having insured more than one million drivers and described plans to expand its products and reach new markets. The funding was a company milestone, distinct from any assessment of Alexander’s personal wealth.
A past worth taking with you
In May 2026, Alexander and Oliver appeared together at number 36 on the Insurance Post Power List. Alexander’s London Tech Week speaker profile described Marshmallow’s purpose in terms of the economic freedom of people who move across borders. The phrasing carries the original concern into a broader financial ambition.
For Alexander, the interesting continuity runs from the driver whose experience did not seem to count to the organisation attempting to count it properly. His public writing keeps returning to access, products and the customer’s everyday circumstances. The business has grown around a group whose financial lives can become unnecessarily complicated precisely when they are trying to make a new start.
The gym lobby is a good opening scene, and the valuations make convenient milestones. But the question that gives his story its shape remains more intimate. How much of the life you have already lived will a new country recognise? Alexander Kent-Braham has helped build a company around one practical answer: your years behind the wheel deserve to come with you.