Emma

Emma sells life insurance to a generation the industry has largely failed to reach. Its case, made from the TechTO stage in March 2021, is that life insurance products have been designed for a hundred years to be sold by a salesperson, and that the resulting experience — long, opaque, full of exclusions — is why younger buyers do not have coverage. Emma's own products are bought through a mobile application in about twenty minutes with an instant approval, and were built explicitly not to refuse pregnant applicants, a routine practice at the time. The line covers term life, permanent life and what the company calls the simplest child rider on the market. Félix Deschatelets co-founded it in Montréal in 2017 with Jacomo Deschatelets, who is CMO, and Guillaume Plante, who is CTO. It launched its proprietary products in March 2020 and was in the inaugural cohort of the Intuit Prosperity Accelerator; it told BetaKit in 2022 that it had grown more than 500 percent since that programme. In April 2022 it closed a $6 million Series A from Luge Capital, Investissement Québec and Tactico, taking total funding past $7 million.