Marshmallow

Marshmallow is a London-based insurtech company founded in 2017 with a mission rooted as much in correcting a market failure as in building an insurance business. The company offers car insurance to immigrants and newcomers to the UK — a population that traditional insurers systematically misprice, often charging far more than actuarial reality would justify simply because a driver's history from their home country cannot be verified through the conventional data sources that UK underwriters rely on to price policies. The founders — twin brothers Oliver and Alexander Kent-Braham and their colleague David Goyder — identified a genuine structural problem: millions of people who were experienced, safe drivers were paying first-year premiums as if they had no driving history at all. The pricing models of legacy insurers defaulted to penalizing what they could not measure, and the result was a population of competent drivers facing discriminatory pricing without meaningful recourse. The financial consequences were significant; the sense of inequity was real. Marshmallow's response was to build a risk assessment engine using machine learning models trained on alternative data signals — behavioral, contextual, and demographic indicators beyond the standard UK insurance history and credit checks. This allows the company to identify lower-risk drivers within the immigrant population and price their policies in a way that reflects their actual driving profile rather than the worst-case assumption applied by default. The outcome is commercially sustainable for Marshmallow because it attracts genuinely better-than-average risks within the segment, and it is fairer for customers who have been overcharged for years through no fault of their own. The digital experience Marshmallow delivers reinforces the commercial proposition: the platform is designed to make getting a quote and purchasing a policy quick, transparent, and straightforward — a contrast with the friction-heavy online journeys that characterize many traditional insurers. For a population that may be unfamiliar with the UK insurance market and potentially less confident navigating complex application processes, that simplicity has commercial value beyond pricing. Marshmallow has progressively broadened its product range beyond car insurance into credit products, building toward a more comprehensive financial services platform for migrants — a population frequently underserved across banking, credit, insurance, and savings simultaneously. In 2025, the company raised $90 million in a new funding round that nearly doubled its valuation to $2 billion, signaling both strong commercial progress and the confidence of investors in the company's ability to expand its model into new product categories and European markets where comparable dynamics create comparable opportunities.