On November 29th 2018, Loadsure was incorporated in the UK. The wheels were then set in motion to create the fantastic team, culture and revolutionary freight insurance offering that exists today. In the time since, we’ve hired over 70 team members across multiple timezones, built out a comprehensive product catalogue, issued more than 150,000 policies and vitally, protected approximately $15Bn worth of risk through Automatic Risk Transfer (ART).

It’s been an extraordinary journey, and I’m very proud of how far we’ve come in the last five years. So I thought I’d take this opportunity to look back at our progress, and the people who helped us make it.

We were a resilient start-up that had to beat the odds.

When Loadsure started out, I had no idea that less than two years in, the world would be struck by a pandemic. Building a start-up is hard enough in a benign climate, but flying this rocketship in the early years was particularly challenging, even as catastrophic events altered the market paradigm and accelerated the adoption of technology like ours.

Suddenly, I was working with a team I couldn’t legally meet in person, trying to raise awareness for a brand-new business in an overseas market. Yet, my two co-founders and I (Jim Heide, COO and Damith Chandrasekara, CTO) had complete conviction in the value and potential of our initial offering. This period gave us an unexpected opportunity to really hone our product, so when we did approach the market, it was fully developed and ready to go. We were launching an industry-first: an AI-powered platform that could generate accurately-priced, per-load cargo insurance in seconds (today, that product is called Thames™).

For us, finding the right people made all the difference.

Against the odds and under a lot of pressure, Loadsure survived, and even expanded. Like any fast-growing company we had our challenges — working out processes, sticking to our roadmap, and hardest of all, finding the right people.

Working for such a young business isn’t for everyone; you need to wear a lot of hats, keep every plate spinning and still find a way to move forward every day. So we spent a lot of time building out a world-class team.

I aspire to be a great founder, and great founders surround themselves with experts. We hired people with unparalleled experience in both freight and insurance industries, who could think outside the box, and weren’t afraid to depart from the status quo. This wasn’t easy — in two such established sectors, there were a lot of professionals with archaic mindsets, who couldn’t see past outdated practices to the potential of a business like Loadsure. The existing cargo insurance market was antiquated; ill-equipped to properly serve the entire freight community – we had to push through that to shape something new.

It was our talent which enabled us to do this. The combination of deep industry understanding and creativity on the Loadsure team is what gives Loadsure such a powerful edge. It’s how we’ve developed our product base, and stayed agile through multiple Black Swan events. But it’s also our people who have allowed the company culture to remain as supportive, inclusive and collaborative as it was when we started out.

Now, we’re an award-winning InsurTech that’s helping to end the global underinsurance crisis.

As well as building a one-of-a-kind business, I want to acknowledge the steps we’ve taken to help end the global underinsurance crisis. Loadsure wasn’t conceived as a clever solution without a problem to solve. Instead, we were built from the inside out. I had seen first-hand the issues facing the freight industry, and initiated the development of a tool that was purpose-built to help.

I’ve written about this at length before — but the freight community has been severely under-served in the past. When starting out, it was our goal to remove the barriers to accessing per-load cargo insurance, and bring down the associated costs deterring businesses from purchasing policies. Today, that mission has grown, but the kernel remains the same. We’ve successfully evolved by listening to the freight community, paying close attention to their pain points, and now our offering goes beyond risk transfer: we provide holistic freight protection. It’s immensely rewarding to have such fantastic feedback from the businesses we serve. We hear both from those who purchase Loadsure policies and those who become claimants. These businesses have been spared a sizable financial loss, and often received a settlement as quickly as 10 seconds after filing their claim.

That’s not to say there aren’t other big milestones that warrant a mention. We were thrilled to receive Lloyd’s cover holder status back in 2019, and the success of our funding journey is a testament to our innovative products. More recently, we won Fintech Business of the Year at the 2023 Go:Tech awards, and even brought the majority of our claims handling in-house. Yet ultimately, it’s always been the way we serve the freight community that I’m most proud of.

What does the future hold? We’re only just scratching the surface…

As for the next five years, I’m thrilled to say we’ve got plenty of exciting developments in the pipeline. Firstly, it’s our ambition to become a world-class claims solution, and I believe we’re already on track to be the best choice for settling claims and pricing policies. In fact, it’s our pricing that enables us to provide a sustainable and profitable underwriting model, through the advanced use of data and technological efficiencies.

Secondly, our product catalogue will continue to evolve, advancing in line with the shifting needs of our assureds. We’ve seen how positively the market responds to our offering, and we’ll assess where else our products could be deployed across the globe.

Perhaps most significantly, we aspire to have Loadsure being the one-stop-shop for both risk transfer and active risk management in the freight industry. We’ll keep providing instantly accessible, affordable policies, but vitally — we’ll continue to advance our approach to active risk management, delivering actionable insights that can minimise risk, and prevent losses from occurring in the first place. This combination is what defines holistic freight protection, and it will be completely transformative for the freight and logistics sector. We’re excited to see the positive impact in real terms.

Above all, I hope to preserve that gritty entrepreneurial spirit we started out with, no matter how big our team or our offering grows. Loadsure’s spectacular team has fostered a culture of respect and genuine understanding; that’s how we got to where we are today.