How one insurtech has overcome the tech recession
Joyn Insurance was founded and launched in 2020, when investments in insurtech were on the rise. With its fully remote team of just 14 members, the insurtech startup company aimed to create a platform that supports and streamlines the entire underwriting process, to provide commercial insurance in the E&S market.
The insurtech saw early on in its journey the rise and fall of insurtech investments – investments hit a record high of $20.4 billion in 2021, though they have since fallen to 57% in the fourth quarter of 2022, the lowest level seen since the first quarter of 2020, according to the Gallagher Re Global Insurtech report.
Ed McGough, co-founder and chief technology officer of Joyn Insurance.
Joyn Insurance
Ed McGough, co-founder and chief technology officer of Joyn says, “Our philosophy from the beginning has always been that we’ll get a better result if we keep the team small, reduce the amount of administrative overhead within the team, but focus on resources with people that we know are not just competent technically, but also competent when it comes to understanding insurance business as well… We had a very, very small engineering team and we needed to have a little bit of additional capacity, a little bit of additional scale, and that’s where we reached out to Commit.”
Commit USA, a global tech and software solutions company, partnered with Joyn mid-2021 to initially engage with the design and development of the Joyn platform’s user experience. As Joyn’s design evolved, and their need for talent, Commit was able to provide additional engineering resources in both project-based engagements and full-time roles in areas like quality assurance (QA) and DevOps.
As demands changed in a market with plummeting insurtech investments, Commit’s R&D model of flexible staffing and offshore workflow enabled Joyn to save significantly on recruitment costs and adapt its team as needed, without additional costs.
Max Nirenberg, chief revenue officer and managing director for North America at Commit.
Commit
Max Nirenberg, chief revenue officer and managing director for North America at Commit explains, “Luckily, [Joyn’s] tech stack is something that is definitely in our wheelhouse. It was very easy for us to just move somebody off of a project and right away, within a week or two, it had who [they] needed. The model is not limited to be project-oriented, but having a project-oriented mindset enables us to quickly scale up and give dedicated people when necessary.”
“Commit impressed us at the beginning…” McGouch states. “What that did was actually position us really well for when things did take a bit of a downturn, you saw a loss across the insurtech industry because the tech industry as a whole company is downsizing significantly, particularly in engineering. We have a pretty small engineering team. We had a couple of more extensive resources who we’d been working with for a long time… And then we have the offshore team, which we’re working with Commit. And because we had kept that team lean, we didn’t need to reduce our costs at all.”
Joyn launched its platform and successfully stayed within budget in July of 2021 by partnering with Commit and utilizing its Flexible R&D recruitment model to eliminate hiring risks and rapidly fill its engineering roles. Joyn reports that its hiring process times have been cut in half and that the time of its onboarding process, too, has reduced by over two-thirds. The insurtech was fully staffed in just under two weeks, with an equal mix of onshore and offshore staff.
Joyn raised over $17 million in its Series A funding round in December of 2022.
“The relationship has been very successful to date… the Commit team has been a significant part of us being able to hit the timelines that we laid out when we went to market when we started the business,” McGough explains. “We got an awful lot done in that first six months of the life of the company , and a big part of that was with Commit. The team that we have now is fabulous, we treat the engineers… as just part of the team.”
The companies plan to continue their partnership together moving forward, with dedicated Commit engineers and a continued relationship to expand the Joyn team as needed.
