Technology

Insurtech startup Elma has closed a €3 million (~$3.2M) Series A funding round led by Mangrove Capital partners to build out a digital-first health insurance business starting with Spain, its domestic market.

Also investing in the Series A are a number of unnamed local investors focused on the healthcare space, along with Barcelona-based investor and company builder Antai Venture Builder (AVB), Arroba Capital, and US VC Joyance Capital Partners.

Elmaco-founders — Miguel Ángel Antón (CEO), Albert Malagarriga (CPO), and Miguel Vicente and Gerard Olivé (also co-founders of its investor, AVB) — have a background in digital industries and startups, building &user centric experiences&, as Antón puts it.

Healthcare experience in the founding team comes via the COO who we&re told spent 12 years at a C-level position at one of the largest health insurers in Spain (now owned by Bupa). Elma also has a chief medical officer — who Antón touts as bringinga wealth of experience in &digital care&.

Since 2017 the team has been building a number of digital healthcare tools that can be accessed via an app. The idea is to entice subscribers to Elmahealthcare cover with the promise of tech-enabled convenience and a shorter wait time vs Spain(free) public healthcare service for remote chats with doctors.

Italso hoping to disrupt legacy health insurance giants by offering slicker digital tools and services.

&Few companies or entities have had the opportunity to think about patient journeys and build and articulate a product that optimizes healthcare outcomes while controlling costs,& argues Antón. &We believe insurers have a privileged position to do that, yet they seem to have little incentive to innovate and adopt digital tools to make it happen given their legacy. We want to build a digital health subscription to better healthier, that includes insurance and is (finally) user centric.&

Among the tools Elma will offer subscribers initially is a telehealth service that lets members talk to a doctor via video call and chat, providing remote primary care and digital prescription (it has a team of seven doctors to serve that from launch) — and a doctor search engine for finding a medical professional to deal with a specific condition (it has a pool of 23,000 doctors in Spain for in-person healthcare).

&We are currently working on a booking feature and integration with test providers to make getting blood tests, scans and so on much easier and interconnected,& adds Antón.

&We are one of the few insurers that provide a full online, comprehensive quoting system for people to understand our products and buy entirely online. These are just a few features that we are releasing with, but our vision is to pursue the digitalization of the industry to fulfil our mission. Prevention, promotion of good habits, digital therapies, are coming up next.&

On the prevention front, this being an insurtech startup, Elmaroadmap includes linking insurance premiums to healthier lifestyles — via some form of behavior tracking.

&Healthier people should benefit from their good habits and we are already testing tools that identify peoplehabits,& Antón confirms, adding: &Other features in our roadmap for next year are integration with wearables, care plans, skin prevention plans, etc.&

The team will be launching its first health insurance product in Spain next month.

Its website already lists pricing for a range of plans &con copago& (which means therea monthly fee to pay for the insurance cover plus an additional fee when you access healthcare services).

&We will have a full &sin copago& product in two weeks but we are believers of insurance with copayment,& Antón tells TechCrunch. &Being healthy makes you reduce visits to the doctor so you can keep your premium low and pay per use which will be best for our customers. We really love copayments…. Best way to pay less.&

The Series A will be put towards scaling in Spain, which is the firm focus for Elma for the foreseeable future given a large addressable local market.

Some 10M+ people (~23% of the population) pay for healthcare, according to Antón, who says this is on account of long wait time for the free public service. A majority of those (60%) pay for health insurance via their employer — so Elma is focusing on selling in to corporates to provide cover for their staff.

&We have an agreement with [insurance broker] Willis Towers Watson who will allow us to quote the most relevant companies in Spain,& he says, adding that italready signed agreements with listed companies (such as Masmovil, Red Electrica Española); startups (eCooltra); and state owned companies (Ferrocarrils de la Generalitat).

&Healthcare is very country specific, thatwhy its really hard to scale this type of company [to other markets]. So far we want to concentrate in Spain. The market here is huge, growing 5%-7% a year and needs a lot of digitalization,& he adds.

&We want to became leader in our market. In the future we will look for markets where our product fits the best, and it may be countries with or without a strong public health system. What we believe is true is if we make it here, where we are competing with an excellent service which is for free (Spanish public healthcare system), we can probably make it anywhere.&

In terms of app-focused competition, on Elmahome turf thereMediQuo, another Barcelona-based startup that promises to put a doctor in your pocket — via an app where users can chat to a medical &amigo&. While itnot a fully fledged health insurance play pricing is low enough that users could combine it with legacy health insurance elsewhere — augmenting their usual cover with an up-to-date app supplement.

Amazon announced more than a few devices today during an event at its headquarters in Seattle, and it was the smallest gadgets that made the biggest impression. The company built Alexa into earbuds, glasses and a ring with the Echo Buds, Echo Frames and Echo Loop, respectively. I&ve tried them all out.

The ones people are most likely to actually want are the earbuds, of course. With Bose noise reduction and Alexa functions built in, they&ll be a popular option for anyone who doesn&t want to take out their phone, but also doesn&t want to wear large over-hear headphones.

The Echo Buds are somewhat large — bigger than several sets of wireless headphones I&ve seen and tried, though they were comfortable after being corkscrewed into my ear.

They have two modes: noise reduction and passthrough, which you switch between with a double tap on either bud. The noise reduction was considerable, but certainly not to the level you&d expect from a pair of over-ears. In-ear headphones already provide a physical barrier to sound getting in, but the addition of three microphones on each ear (two external and one internal) let it do the usual electronic reduction as well. I could still hear the crowd around me and people speaking to me, but it was easily drowned out by the Billie Eilish song they queued up.

Passthrough provided a quick and clear version of surrounding audio with no noticeable delay. Music and other stuff can still be played in this mode and it blended pretty seamlessly in.

Of course the Echo Buds, like pretty much everything else at the event, have Alexa built in. You get at the service via a wake word, a process that worked well for me.

Their little case looks more fiddly than it is. Magnets snap the contacts onto each other and it begins charging immediately. You should get some 4-5 hours with the buds, out to 20 hours if you drain the case too.

About five feet away from these headphones, and with a half hour wait to test out, were the new Echo Frames. These glasses can be customized with your prescription, though sadly the design and material are locked in.

The oversized arms of the glasses house the Alexa hardware, and while the glasses themselves are pretty light, the thickness is definitely noticeable from any angle. The underside of the right arm has an activation button and a volume rocker, as well as the port for magnetic charging. The big shiny sides are touch sensitive; you swipe to accept a call, respond to Alexa offering more info and so on.

The sound is a bit like someone whispering in your ear — you wouldn&t want to listen to music on these, the Amazon folks admitted. But speech was clear and Alexa commands were handled quickly.

The speakers aren&t exactly hidden: Each arm has two speakers inside, each of which has two &ports,& one on top and one on bottom. I asked the demonstrator probably five times why there are ports on the top if the sound needs to come out the bottom, but all she would say is that ithow they made the directional audio work.

Perhaps thatalso why I could hear the Alexa responses from a foot or two away in a crowded room. You can configure it so only certain things get played automatically, which is good, because if the person on the bus next to me heard some of the texts I get, they might be alarmed.

Honestly itnot much worse, though a bit clearer, than if someone is using bad earbuds. Just be aware that if you use these things, others might be hearing that whispered text conversation too.

Last, and weirdest, is the Echo Loop. Ita big fat ring that you can use to ask Alexa questions and hear the answers. The big part with the dots isn&t actually the speaker, but rather part of the microphone array — presumably for subtracting ambient noise so the speech recognition works better. The inside of the ring is where you&ll find the tiny speaker — the smallest of any Amazon device, it was said — and mic.

You tap a button to activate Alexa, and the ring will vibrate to let you know ittime to talk. You then ask your hand the question you have in mind, and afterwards cup the ring to your ear — right up to it, because this speaker is tiny. A second or two later, out comes Alexavoice, sounding like an old transistor radio, telling you the weather in Barcelona or whatever.

Does it work? Yes, it does. Ita ring you can ask questions. The speaker is pretty quiet and you need to find the right position to hear it well (admittedly it was fairly loud in the room), but the ring speaks.

Itnot for everybody, which is why it, along with the glasses, are part of the new Day One Edition series of questionable devices. But if you can think of a way it might be useful, be assured: It works as advertised.

2Whatin a name?

More than two years ago, Fast Company published a story with the headline &Two Ex-Googlers Want To Make Bodegas And Mom-And-Pop Corner Stores Obsolete.& The focus of the story was a nascent startup by the name of Bodega .

The company had raised $2.5 million in funding from First Round CapitalJosh Kopelman, Forerunner Ventures& Kirsten Green and HomebrewHunter Walk. To announce their funding and vision to create the unmanned store of the future, Bodega briefed a number of journalists on its big idea. Given the simplicity of its product — a tech-enabled vending machine, in essence — the team was blindsided by the uproarious response that followed. September 13, 2017 was supposed to be the most exciting day in the startuphistory, at least until that point; instead, it was a nightmarish lesson in poor branding and messaging.

&It was a difficult time and transition and we learned a lot from it,& a spokesperson for Stockwell said in an email to TechCrunch. &As a company, we put our heads down and focused on building our business. We kept a low profile and concentrated on our core product, the mission, and the people who work for us. We&re excited for the progress we&ve made but won&t forget the path that got us here.&