Building embedded, affordable insurance for the millions of African consumers that traditional insurers have long overlooked - delivered through the banks, telcos and fintechs people already use.
Financial inclusion has a well-documented success story and a quieter blind spot. Over the past decade, mobile money and digital banking reached hundreds of millions of previously unbanked people across Africa. Insurance did not keep pace. A savings account helps you plan for next month; it does little the week a breadwinner lands in hospital or a season's crop fails. That gap - the distance between the risks emerging consumers face and the protection they can actually buy - is the problem Inclusivity Solutions set out to close.
Founded in Cape Town in 2015 by Jeremy Leach, Inclusivity Solutions is an inclusive insurtech. It does not try to be a household insurance brand. Instead it operates as a B2B2C platform: it supplies the technology, product design and insurance expertise, then partners with the organisations that already reach the customer - banks, telecommunications operators, microfinance institutions, insurers and fintechs. Those partners distribute affordable cover to their own users, often collecting premiums in amounts small enough to be paid in cents over mobile money.
The result is reach that looks improbable for a company of its size. Inclusivity Solutions reports serving more than two million customers across roughly ten African markets - South Africa, Kenya, Rwanda, Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana, Uganda, Zambia, Malawi, Botswana and Gabon - with a team of about 27 people. That ratio is only possible because the company sells infrastructure, not individual policies.
Designs and operates embedded digital insurance products - life, accident, hospital cash, credit, device, crop, income and more - and runs the platform that administers them end to end.
Directly: banks, telcos, MFIs, (re)insurers and fintechs. Ultimately: low- and middle-income emerging consumers who have historically been priced or shut out of formal cover.
Africa's protection gap. Traditional insurance is too costly to distribute and too complex to buy for most emerging consumers. Inclusivity Solutions makes it cheap to run and simple to access.
At the centre sits ASPin, an open-API, low-code insurance platform. It handles the unglamorous machinery of insurance - policy administration, sales, premium collection and claims management - and exposes it through APIs so a partner can design and launch a product in hours rather than the months or years a legacy insurer would need.
Around the platform, the company offers the specialist services that emerging-market products require: actuarial and pricing support, consumer analytics, product design, and the technical integration work that lets a telco or bank weave cover into a customer journey the user already trusts.
The product catalogue is deliberately broad and deliberately cheap: life and accident cover, hospital cash, credit and device protection, crop and goods insurance, income protection, medical, property and motor - assembled to fit the risks and budgets of the markets it serves.
The business model is the strategy. Rather than acquire customers one policy at a time - ruinously expensive when premiums are measured in cents - Inclusivity Solutions plugs into partners who already have scale and trust. Revenue comes from providing the platform and sharing in the products delivered across it. Each new telco or bank partner can open a market of millions without a proportional increase in cost.
That is also what sets it apart. Where many insurtechs chase affluent, well-served customers with slicker apps, Inclusivity Solutions went the other direction - toward the overlooked majority - and built the low-cost, multi-market plumbing to serve them. Its edge is not a single clever product but the combination of embedded distribution, an open-API platform, and deep emerging-market insurance expertise operating across roughly ten regulatory regimes at once.
Cover sold inside apps and services customers already use - not through a costly standalone salesforce.
ASPin lets partners launch and iterate products in hours, keeping unit costs low enough for micro-premiums.
Actuarial, product and compliance know-how tuned to African markets, not retrofitted from developed-world insurance.
Indira Gopalakrishna has led Inclusivity Solutions as Chief Executive Officer since 2021. Trained as a computer scientist in Bangalore before earning an MBA, she spent more than a decade inside multinational insurers across India and Singapore - roles at ICICI Prudential, Manulife and MetLife's innovation centre - before moving toward impact-driven work. A fellowship in Kenya with the ILO's Impact Insurance Facility and consulting at the Microinsurance Centre @ Milliman pointed her squarely at the emerging-consumer problem.
Founder Jeremy Leach remains as Executive Director. The leadership bench spans country operations and engineering, reflecting a company that has to be equally fluent in actuarial science, software and the specifics of a dozen African markets.
Inclusivity Solutions sits at the intersection of Africa's telcos, banks and insurers - the connective tissue that lets each distribute protection they could not efficiently build alone. Its partner roster reads like a map of the continent's largest consumer brands.
The competitive set
It shares the inclusive-insurtech field with players such as Pula, Turaco, Lami Technologies, aYo/MicroEnsure, Democrance and Bluewave, as well as the digital arms of incumbent insurers. Its distinguishing bet is breadth of product plus depth of platform across many markets at once, backed by patient, impact-minded capital.
Jeremy Leach establishes Inclusivity Solutions to build digital insurance for emerging consumers.
Secures roughly US$1.3M with RGAx and angels, launching digital insurance in East and West Africa.
The insurance and product veteran joins to scale the platform across the continent.
Raises Series A led by Goodwell Investments with Allan Gray and RGA participation.
Goodwell leads an extension joined by 27four, targeting expansion to at least 12 markets.
27four's Nebula Fund backs entry into five new African countries and deeper partnerships.
It is a B2B2C inclusive insurtech that designs and operates embedded, affordable digital insurance products for emerging consumers in Africa, delivered through partner banks, telcos, insurers and fintechs via its open-API platform ASPin.
It is headquartered in Cape Town, South Africa, and operates across roughly ten African markets including Kenya, Rwanda, Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana, Uganda, Zambia, Malawi, Botswana and Gabon.
It was founded in 2015 by Jeremy Leach, who serves as Executive Director. Indira Gopalakrishna has been Chief Executive Officer since 2021.
Roughly US$10.7 million in total, including a US$1.5 million Series A extension led by Goodwell Investments in November 2023, with backers such as RGA, Allan Gray and 27four.
ASPin is the company's open-API, low-code insurance platform that handles policy administration, sales, premium collection and claims, letting partners launch low-cost insurance products quickly.