Grace, an insurance company for luxury goods, announced on Wednesday a $6.4 million (€5.9 million) seed round led by FinTech Collective and Speedinvest.
An insurance company for luxury goods, Grace works with luxury brands to protect purchased consumer goods. If an item is stolen or damaged, a consumer can create a claim through the Grace app. For the brand, the Grace app also provides fraud detection, claim processing, and logistic coordination.
The company confirmed that it is working with at least one major luxury brand in Europe, though it declined to share the name.
Co-founder and president Lou Dana said that she and her co-founders — Quentin Roy, CEO, and Martin Lenweiter, Grace’s CTO — decided to launch this company after seeing how unprotected many luxury goods still are, especially when people are traveling abroad.
“There was clearly a massive gap between the service levels luxury brands promise and what happens post-purchase when something goes wrong,” Dana said.
The number of stolen luxury goods has just about tripled in the past few years, and it’s becoming costly for fashion houses to keep up. Grace says it is already working with Chubb, a world leader in insurance, to underwrite and secure its services.
But convincing luxury houses to adopt new technology hasn’t always been the easiest of tasks to complete. Roy said that brands have struggled to control what happens to their products after a sale, especially when it goes wrong. “We weren’t just offering protection,” Roy said about the company’s pitch. “We were helping elevate their brand.”
There are other types of insurance companies for consumer goods, such as Zing Cover, which also provides specialist insurance for luxury goods. Roy said that Grace doesn’t compete with just one company, as it stands at the intersection of embedded insurance, luxury services, and post-purchase protection. Kima, Bpifrance, and Firstminute Capital all participated in the round.
Dana said the fresh capital would be used to help the company scale across Europe and hire more people in product engineering. It hopes to cover more than 200,000 luxury items by the end of this year.
