Slovenia’s start-up InsurePal raises $18 mln in cryptocurrency offering

LJUBLJANA (Slovenia),  Slovenian-based start-up InsurePal, a distributed social proof insurance platform, said on Wednesday it has raised $18 million (14.7 million euro) in its Initial Coin Offering (ICO) by selling-out all 201 million of its tokens.

“InsurePal finished their crowdsale after successfully reaching the hard cap of $18MM in only 80 seconds and selling-out all 201 million IPL tokens available,” the company said in a statement.

An ICO is a means of fundraising for a new cryptocurrency venture often used by start-ups to bypass the regulated capital-raising process required by venture capitalists or banks.

The funds raised by InsurePal are intended for the technological development of their insurance platform based on on blockchain technology and social proofing.

“For us, this is a tremendous opportunity and a great honor and we are focused on the future as we wish to be fully operational in the shortest possible time. Our goal is to utilize the progress made thus far to launch the platform in six months’ period,” said InsurePal CEO, Matt Peterman.

“The pilot project will take place in the UK, where we`ve already held several talks with insurance companies as potential partners and with the regulator. We partly assembled a team as well,” he added.

The IPL tokens were delivered to InsurePal contributors after the crowdsale and will soon be listed on several exchanges. Therefore, InsurePal will start trading almost immediately, giving all the latecomers the opportunity to buy the IPL tokens, the company said.

InsurePal, founded by former insurance executives Matt Peterman and Tom Volk, will work based on the theory of social influence. On its website it says it aims to become a first-of-a-kind blockchain-based decentralized insurance platform powered by social proof guarantee.

Peterman explained that social proofing will make it possible for individuals to store their data based on social evidence on the distributed ledger, empowering them with sovereignty on deciding whether, when and which companies will be given permit to access them.

“The insurance platform that introduces social proofing can truly act as a universal solution disrupting the existing $7 trillion insurance market and at the same time, entering into many new segments. I am convinced that we will achieve our business goals in planned time and thus become the leading global provider in this field,” he added.