A Singapore insurtech quietly turned the checkout button into an insurance counter. Now 230 insurers and 700 partners run through its pipes.
Buy a new phone in Bangkok, top up a mobile plan in Manila, or finance a fridge in Jakarta, and there is a decent chance you brush up against bolttech without ever seeing the name. It is not the insurer. It is not the store. It is the thin layer in between that lets the store offer you insurance at the exact moment you are reaching for your wallet - and then quietly handles the paperwork if something goes wrong.
That is the whole idea of embedded insurance, and bolttech has become one of its largest operators. Founded in Singapore in 2020 by Richard Li's Pacific Century Group, the company connects roughly 230 insurers with more than 700 distribution partners across 39 markets on four continents. Put together, those connections quote north of US$85 billion in premiums a year. In June 2025 the business closed a US$147 million Series C that valued it at US$2.1 billion.
For most of its history, insurance has asked people to go looking for it. You decide you need cover, you visit a website or an agent, you compare, you buy. The trouble is that most people never take the first step. The global "protection gap" - the risk that sits uninsured because nobody got round to it - runs into the trillions.
bolttech's bet is that the fix is not better advertising but better placement. Sell the cover at the point of the related purchase, when the customer is already thinking about the thing being protected. Insure the phone as the phone is bought. A device-protection policy usually costs somewhere between 2 and 10 percent of the device's value - insurance priced like a phone accessory, and sold like one too.
The word doing the heavy lifting there is "right time." A person shopping for a router is, for that minute, the most receptive audience for router insurance they will ever be. Miss the minute and the sale rarely happens later. bolttech's platform exists to catch that minute at scale, across thousands of products and hundreds of partners, without each partner having to become an insurer.
Strip away the jargon and bolttech sits in the middle of a three-sided market. On one side, insurers who have capacity and products but limited reach. On the other, distributors - telcos, banks, retailers, e-commerce platforms, device makers - who have millions of customers but no appetite to run an insurance operation. In the middle, the customer, who just wants their new purchase protected without a form-filling ordeal.
The connective tissue is a stack of unglamorous tools. A Distribution Engine gives partners an "insurer library" of product connections, a no-code configurator to shape a policy, dynamic quoting and a data marketplace. An Embedded Insurance API drops quote-bind-pay into any checkout or app. Behind the sale sit the parts customers only meet when things break: a claims portal, policy administration and global contact centers.
None of that is glamorous, and that is rather the point. bolttech is run largely by insurance operators, not growth hackers. Its Founder and Group CEO, Rob Schimek, was chief commercial officer at FWD before this, and trained as an insurance man rather than a coder. The company builds the back office of insurance and lets partners keep the customer relationship.
bolttech's anchor line of business is protecting mobile phones and consumer electronics against theft, damage and accident, with 24/7 support and fast repair or replacement. It is a sensible wedge: high volume, low ticket, easy to explain, and tied to a purchase people make constantly. But the more interesting story is what the same rails carry next.
The platform now stands up ready-to-launch programs across home, travel, cyber, mobility, health tech and consumer electronics - and custom-built cover for partners who want something specific. A telco selling a WiFi router can bundle cyber protection with it. A bank can attach cover to a financed appliance. Same pipes, new cargo. That is the pattern platform companies follow when they work: win a narrow, high-frequency use case, then reuse the infrastructure.
Figures are company-reported and approximate.
bolttech runs a B2B2C model. It rarely sells insurance under its own consumer brand; it earns from the partners it powers - commissions, program fees, and technology-and-servicing arrangements spread across the insurance lifecycle. Reported annualized revenue is in the region of US$320 million. The economics work the way small-ticket, high-volume businesses do: each policy is a rounding error, but multiply it across 700 partners and 39 markets and the numbers add up.
That line is worth sitting with, because it explains the competitive shape of the market. bolttech competes with other infrastructure players - the likes of Cover Genius, Qover and Wefox - but its most common rival is a large telco or retailer deciding to wire up insurance itself. The pitch against that is straightforward: building an insurer library, a claims operation and a compliance footprint across dozens of markets is expensive and slow, and it is not what a phone company is good at.
bolttech's customer list reads in two columns. On one side, the insurers supplying capacity - AXA, Liberty Mutual, Progressive and dozens more. On the other, the distributors putting cover in front of shoppers: Samsung and Apple in devices, Lazada in e-commerce, Orange in telco, Home Credit in consumer finance. In 2023 Allianz Partners signed on to offer embedded device and appliance protection across Asia Pacific and the United States, working on programs like embedding cover for an electronics brand's customers in Thailand.
Read the list as a supply chain rather than a trophy cabinet and the model comes into focus. Each partner brings a captive audience bolttech would struggle to reach directly, and each insurer brings a product bolttech does not want to underwrite itself. bolttech's job is to make those two sides fit together cleanly enough that a customer barely notices the handoff.
bolttech has raised more than US$690 million since 2020, and the cap table reads like an industry roll call. Pacific Century Group supplied nearly all the early equity. Later rounds brought in insurers Tokio Marine and MetLife, along with LeapFrog Investments and Khazanah. The 2025 Series C added Dragon Fund, Baillie Gifford and Generali's Lion River, then closed with Sumitomo Corporation and Iberis Capital - Sumitomo also forming a joint venture to push embedded insurance further across Asia.
The presence of insurers on the cap table matters. When Tokio Marine, MetLife, Generali and Sumitomo all put money in, they are not just financing a startup; they are validating the channel bolttech represents. For carriers, the platform is a way to reach customers they would never sign up one policy at a time.
bolttech describes itself as the most globally scaled insurtech, and the geographic spread supports the claim. Rather than dominate one country, it has spread thin and wide - Asia, Europe, Africa, the Americas - trading the depth of a single-market champion for the reach of a network. The stated next moves point at Africa and North America.
The strategic logic is the network effect. Every new insurer makes the platform more useful to distributors; every new distributor makes it more attractive to insurers. Past a certain size, the network itself becomes the moat, because a rival has to rebuild not just the software but the relationships. bolttech spent five years assembling those relationships one integration at a time, which is the least exciting and most durable way to build a business like this.
For a customer, the payoff is mundane in the best sense: the phone gets protected in the same tap that buys it, and if the screen shatters, a claim gets handled without a trip to an insurer's website. For a partner, it is a new revenue line without a new department. And for bolttech, it is a position in the middle of an enormous, underserved flow of everyday risk.