EP 31 – Wei Zhu and Arijit Chakraborty – Axinan – Get Those Labs More Integrated

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Theresa is the founder of the Asia InsurTech Podcast and a Thought Leader on innovation in insurance in Asia. She has worked for ten years for leading multinational insurers in Europe and Asia before turning to management consulting and venture building with the goal of transforming the insurance industry and helping shape its future in the region.

Guest
Wei Zhu

Wei Zhu is an accomplished leader in technology space with over 20+ years experience. He is the founder and CEO of Axinan, a ​full-stack Insurtech company based out of Singapore. Prior to Axinan, Wei served as the Chief Technology Officer of Grab, the largest ride-hailing company in Southeast Asia. Wei was also one of the first 100 engineers of Facebook where he spent six years after an eight-year-stint with Microsoft in the U.S. Wei received a bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Washington.

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In this episode, AIP founder Theresa Blissing visited full stack InsurTech Axinan in their Singapore office and talked to the founder, Wei Zhu, and the Chief Insurance Officer & General Counsel, Arijit Chakraborty. Openspace Ventures backed and Paypal incubated, Axinan is both a B2B and B2C InsurTech focusing on logistics as well as consumer electronics. The firm was founded in June 2016 by Wei Zhu who was previously CTO at Grab and an early engineer at Facebook

Wei talks about InsurTech in Asia and the trend for full stack InsurTechs. (If you would like to learn more about full stack InsurTechs in Asia, read Rahul’s latest blog post). Wei and Arijit explain how Axinan collaborates with e-commerce platforms in order to enable a smooth online shopping experience across Southeast Asia. But the InsurTech is also offering smartphone coverage via their Igloo platform. 

Axinan has developed not only a highly scalable digital platform but a new technique to underwrite smartphone protection which allows the company to provide coverage not only for new smartphones but also for older ones. Arijit gives insight into their partnership strategies and what role the reinsurance licences plays that the company has recently obtained in Labuan. 

The company has just entered Thailand and the Philippines and is now working on entering Vietnam as well as launching a travel insurance solution.

Other companies mentioned in this episode:

Lazada, Igloo, and Bukalapak

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