Scouting for Growth Florian Graillot: Astorya.vc ... Europe’s Early-Stage InsurTech Investor
On this episode, Sabine VdL interviews Florian Graillot, an investor and co-founder of Astorya.vc or Astorya. Astorya invests in Seed InsurTech startups across Europe. In this conversation, the pair covers topics including who he is, why he started Astorya, and how he sees the world of corporate venturing today and tomorrow.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- There is a trend emerging of direct competition between Tier 1 insurance players and reinsurance companies working directly with InsurTech startups, enabling them to bypass specific insurance providers across the value chain. The latter has a massive impact on how the market is being restructured behind the scenes.
- Florian founded Astorya with co-founder Jan Kastory because he saw a market gap. As an investor, Florian shares that Astorya’s focus is investing in entrepreneurs first, utilising his team’s financial and entrepreneurial background. Given this context, it makes sense that Astorya attracts top tech entrepreneurs. At Astorya, Florian states, "We understand how to grow businesses as we do just that ourselves every day."
- FinTech investors only commit 10% of their time to InsurTech. Astorya only does InsurTech, explains Florian, meaning that 100% of Astorya’s time is dedicated to insurance tech ventures. And this is why Astorya’s limited partners invested in the firm. The Limited Partners know that the Astorya team will spend 100% of its time on the InsurTech topic every single day of the week.
- Don’t be afraid of what you read in the newspapers. There are still many opportunities to address in InsurTech; not everything has been done yet. The full insurance value chain needs to be unbundled, re-bundled, and revamped, and InsurTech startups can address this in numbers. We already have a few unicorns within the InsurTech space. Don’t forget that technology is a means to an end; without it, succeeding in any industry becomes tougher and tougher. Today, technology becomes your competitive edge over traditional insurance companies.
BEST MOMENTS
‘InsurTech is way broader than just insurance. It can be connected to almost any industry.’
‘Tech investment is in my DNA, insurance is much more opportunistic.’
‘There’s always somebody who is managing more money than you. It’s not about money, it’s about the industry, focus, understanding, and capacity to accelerate go-to-market strategies, especially around software or B2B technologies.’
‘It may be very easy to raise money at the very beginning of the startup journey, or when you are big enough to attract a huge round from private equity investors, but when you are in the middle, it’s still challenging. I believe that both entrepreneurs and corporates should keep that in mind.’
ABOUT THE GUEST
Florian Graillot is a founding partner and VC investor at Astorya.vc where he invests in early-stage tech startups in Europe. His main focus is to identify, evaluate, and invest in growth ventures that utilise next-generation customer-centric technologies to reinvent insurance. His skills include investment, financial modelling, entrepreneurship, business development, and strategy.
ABOUT THE HOST
Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and trust. On Scouting for Growth, she decodes how real growth happens—where capital, collaboration, and courage meet.
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