Smartie.ch, the ‘Tripadvisor for Insurance Business’

Smartie is a free online insurance aggregator that allows users to compare insurance products, features and providers, simplifying the buying experience for consumers while improving sales for insurance companies.

Alongside being a comparison service, Smartie is also a community of consumers that rate and review health and auto insurance products the same way as Tripadvisor allows users to rate and review hotels.

The service brings insurance companies, agents and customers together into a simple and intuitive platform to make buying and selling of insurance services simple and smart. Smartie aims to both increase efficiency and transparency of the insurance market, as well as increase productivity of insurance agents.

Smartie’s technology accumulates large amounts of data allowing you to compare price and performance, request a consultation with an agent and connect with other members of the community.

Currently, Smartie links users to 13 agents mainly based in Switzerland who speak English, German and French. Agents are rated by users, who can contact them via email or via Skype to discuss, clarify doubts or buy insurance products.

In addition, the company regularly creates educational video content to help users with anything related to insurance products.

Smartie is one of the many websites that are offering comparison services in Switzerland. Currently, the domestic market is led by Comparis.ch, which counts over 1 million users per month. Comparis.ch provides easy and quick tariff and service comparisons for all sorts of businesses including insurance companies, banks, telecom providers, real estate, and many others.

Another popular website is MoneyLand.ch, a comparison service that analyzes more than 2,500,000 financial products, services and fees; this includes bank accounts, credit cards, loans, mortgages, investing and trading products.

Series A funding round

Launched in September 2015, Smartie is a product of Andiast Technologies GmbH (Andiast). Andiast is a software product development startup founded in 2011 by Raghav Belavadi and Shikha Bedi.

In September last year, Andiast raised about US$1.5 million in pre-Series A funding round from Frank Marthaler, a former CEO of Swiss Post Solutions, and other investors. The investment led to the appointment of Marthaler as Chairman of Andiast.

At the time, Andiast’s founder and CEO Raghav Belavadi, said he planned to launch Smartie to additional country including Germany, Austria, France and India, he told Techcircle.in.

Prior to Andiast, Belavadi worked as a senior executive at Accenture, Hughes Network Systems, Infosys and Wipro. Bedi on the other hand worked for Bank of America and UBS Investment Bank.

Alongside Smartie, Andiast also operates barebars, an online tool to rate, compare and analyze companies.

The company is planning to raise another US$30 million in its Series A funding round and is reportedly in talks with a Swiss telecom provider and a German venture capital firm to raise part of that money.