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Jon Richards, Samer Chehab, and Jonathan Rawling, CFO.

Compareit4me secures $3.5m funding

DUBAI, May 24, 2017

Compareit4me.com, a leading comparison site in the Middle East, has raised $3.5 million from its existing investors, including STC Ventures, Wamda Capital, Dubai Silicon Oasis Authority and Saned Partners, in its latest phase of funding.

The money raised is part of an initial closing ahead of a larger, Series B round of funding to be concluded in the coming months. It will be used to help the company expedite the growth of its fast-growing insurance business in the UAE and wider Middle East, the company said.

Since launching the UAE’s first online car insurance comparison portal in March 2016, compareit4me’s insurance business has grown to a levels where it sells $1.5 million worth of insurance policies per month, with the company expecting that number to reach $5 million per month by the end of 2017.  

The majority of the new investment has come from existing investors STC Ventures, managed by Iris Capital, and Wamda Capital, which first backed compareit4me in the company’s Series A in 2015, with both doubling their investment in the business through this latest round of financing. The round also includes further investment from Dubai Silicon Oasis Authority and Saned Partners. To date, compareit4me has raised over $9 million in total.

As of April 2017, compareit4me’s year-on-year growth in insurance policy sales reached 600 per cent, making the company, by a considerable margin, the largest insurance aggregator in the UAE and one of the country’s top insurance distributors, it said.

And with sales five to seven times greater than those of its nearest competitor, over that same period, compareit4me has seen GMV (the total value of policies sold) growth of over 400 per cent, it added.

“Progress in the insurance business has been such that we have already outgrown the office we took on last year for our state-of-the-art call centre. As we continue to expand the call centre, we will soon be moving into a much bigger office to accommodate our growing staff of agents,” said Samer Chehab, COO of compareit4me.com.

With the launch of online insurance comparison in Saudi Arabia imminent for compareit4me, the company is looking to capitalise on pent-up demand for the ability to compare prices and buy policies online, he said.

“As we saw when we launched car insurance comparison in the UAE, and as our growth numbers prove, there is so much demand among consumers to arrange insurance online. In the UK, well over 50 per cent of policies are bought online, whereas the Middle East figure is a fraction of that. We’ll be working to change that as we launch in new markets and consumers realise the benefits of comparing and buying policies online,” said Jon Richards, CEO of compareit4me.com. – TradeArabia News Service

 




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