1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Joshua Posamentier of Congruent Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s do another one.

Joshua Posamentier: We have a company called Energetic Insurance which is a pure-play InsurTech company. They make an insurance product backed by a top 5 global reinsurance company to do credit enhancement for customers that want to get solar and other energy products and have no credit of their own. So small businesses frequently just don’t have any credit.

If you’re a Fortune 500 company, you have that credit. It’s a lot more difficult for small businesses. You have to have a recourse loan. You have to have personal guarantees. It’s a hot opportunity globally for new energy deployments.

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. In the two examples that you shared so far, talk a bit about how these companies come to you and what they came with.

Joshua Posamentier: AMP Robotics initially came in through a friend who had previously worked at a lab at Colorado. He joined the company as a business advisor. I was at a conference in Denver. He just caught me in between events and said, “You have to meet this guy. This is an amazing idea.” It was the two of them and a PowerPoint.

Sramana Mitra: They developed the technology after you invested?

Joshua Posamentier: The core technology had mostly been initially developed at CalTech. I don’t think they’ve built to test this on a real-world system yet. The concept was good. This is a space we looked in previously for many years and never made an investment.

We’re generally familiar with the problem they were trying to solve. It seemed like a compelling solution to a problem we already knew existed.

Sramana Mitra: What was the check size?

Joshua Posamentier: The round size was initially somewhere between $3.5 million and $4.5 million. We certainly did a good chunk of that. Then we raised a little more capital last year – under $20 million for Series A.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s switch to the other example that you talked about. What is the trajectory and how did you find it? What caught your attention?

Joshua Posamentier: With Energetic, I hadn’t met either of the founders previously. They’re both energy space veterans. We never crossed paths. I was introduced via one of their advisors who I’ve known for years. That company is based in Boston.

I was introduced extremely early. Both co-founders had just left their prior jobs. They said, “We’re not ready to raise but here’s what we’re doing. What do you think?” We kept in touch. They made some more progress. They reached out two to three months later and said, “Here’s what we’ve done.” 

Sramana Mitra: What have they done?

Joshua Posamentier: The core of that business is their underwriting engine. It ingests a lot of data from the markets and provides underwriting guidance. Initially, they proved that they could gather a lot of data and show that it was good data. That was the first question they answered.

The second question they answered is, “Is it possible to structure a product that’s poorly capitalized with an insurance partner of some sort?” That was the second question they spent three months digging into. I have spent some of this time just coming up to speed with insurance because I have never invested in an insurance company before. That’s what I did on the side. They proved those two things.

We led their pre-seed round to ensure that they can actually build a product of some sort. Thus far, it had all been paper and manual. That first pre-seed round enabled them to build a minimum viable product hacked together and developed a formal relationship with a reinsurance partner.

Then we also led the seed. That was contingent on them signing up that reinsurance partner. We made the first investment two and a half years ago. We led the seed last year.

This segment is part 2 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Joshua Posamentier of Congruent Ventures
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