Our story
A broken wrist, a ₦45,000 bill, and no way to pay it.
In November 2023, Bright’s cousin — a food delivery rider in Lagos — broke his wrist in a collision. He spent six weeks unable to work. His income went to zero. His medical bill came to ₦45,000. He had nothing to cover either.
Bright was an actuary and tried to enrol him in a personal accident policy at work. The minimum premium was ₦24,000 a year. The form required a salary slip. He did not have one.
That evening, Bright called Taiwo. “There are 35 million people this product should exist for,” Bright said, “and it does not.”
Aug 2024
Founded, Lagos
₦17M
Pre-seed + sandbox grant
2,800
Policyholders
1h 47min
Avg. auto-approval
The team
Six people. Three of them left the insurance industry to build this.
Okonkwo Bright
CEO and Co-founder
Second-time founder. Co-founded a Lagos payments startup in 2019, acquired by a pan-African payments group in 2022 — the exit that seeded part of Insurenowtech’s pre-seed round. Before that, four years as an actuary at Allianz Nigeria, then AXA Mansard, and a Fellow of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries. Spent a year trying to persuade a former employer to launch a micro-insurance product for gig workers; the answer was no. Left insurance in 2023 to build Insurenowtech instead. Owns product vision, actuarial design, the NAICOM relationship, and underwriting.
“Traditional insurers know gig workers exist. They have chosen not to serve them because the ticket size is small. We built a business where the ticket size is small and the volume is 35 million people.”
Taiwo Oluwaseun
CTO and Co-founder
BSc Computer Science, Obafemi Awolowo University. Four years engineering at Paga, Nigeria’s payment infrastructure company, where he worked on USSD session management, low-latency APIs, and payment orchestration. He owns the technical architecture, the USSD handler, the partner API, and the AWS stack.
“We built the USSD handler before the web app. If it did not work for a rider with 100MB of data, we had not solved the problem yet.”
Biodun Ojo
CPO and Co-founder
Five years in product at Cowrywise, the savings and investment platform, where he led the consumer product team. BSc Economics, University of Ibadan. He owns product design, the claims flow, and the WhatsApp product.
“This is for someone who has never dealt with insurance before. Every word in the product has to work for that person. No jargon. No fine print they cannot understand.”
Amina Garba
Claims Specialist
Four years handling insurance claims at AIICO. Joined Insurenowtech in September 2024. She runs the human review queue — every claim the AI does not auto-approve lands on her desk with a prepared brief.
How we got here
- Nov 2023Founding insight
- Mar 2024First USSD prototype, 40 test policyholders
- Aug 2024Kova Insurance Technology Ltd. incorporated, Lagos State
- Sep 2024NAICOM Microinsurance Sandbox grant
- Sep 2024Pre-seed closed (₦17M), led by angel investors
- Oct 2024First platform partner — a Lagos delivery aggregator, 800 riders
- Jan 20252,800 active policyholders, 340 claims processed
- Q3 2025Second platform partner; NAICOM full licence application
What we hold to
- 01
Honest products
We explain what is covered and what is not in the same message. We do not hide exclusions in a PDF no one opens.
- 02
Claims settled fast
A rider who waited two weeks for a decision has already found another way to survive. We aim for two hours on small claims.
- 03
Designed for the real user
If we have to explain to someone how to use the product, the product is wrong.