Jove Raises £3.6M to Bring Borderless Business Insurance to Contractors and SMEs

October 22, 2024

Jove has completed the first closing of its seed funding round, raising £3.6 million to accelerate product development and scale its operations. The round was led by Explorer Investments, a Portuguese private equity and venture firm, with additional participation from Seed X, Love Ventures, Portfolio Ventures, New Alpha Asset Management, Exceptional Ventures, and Start Ventures, alongside angel investors including former Google executive Dan Cobley. A £400,000 allocation remained open for a second closing before January 2025. Funds will be used to develop the company's AI-powered insurance validation platform and grow its team and commercial partnerships.

Contractors and freelancers operating across multiple countries face a fragmented insurance landscape built for a pre-remote era. Traditional insurers rarely offer coverage that crosses borders cleanly, forcing contractors to navigate multiple policies, jurisdictions, and administrative processes. Recruitment firms and managed service providers face a parallel headache, needing to verify that their global supplier networks are properly insured before work begins. Jove was built to address exactly this gap, positioning itself as what it claims is the first insurtech to offer borderless business liability insurance to SMEs and contractors working across hundreds of occupations in the UK, Europe, and the US.

The platform operates on a fully digital, subscription-based model with flexible terms that can be paused when contractors are not actively working—removing the waste inherent in annual fixed-term policies. Its AI-powered insurance validation integrates directly with Applicant Tracking Systems and HR information platforms, enabling hiring organisations to verify contractor insurance compliance in real time without additional administration. Jove claims the end-to-end quote-and-purchase journey takes under 30 seconds. Coverage extends across business liability, workers' compensation, sickness, portable equipment, hired-in plant, and goods in transit.

The company has already established commercial partnerships with major global recruitment firms and managed service providers, including InterEx, Magnit, Remote, and Hays, as well as mobility platforms such as Shiply. This traction with enterprise-grade distribution partners underlines the platform's value to both sides of the contractor economy. Jove's earlier backing came from Fuel Ventures in October 2021, which supported the company through its initial build-out. The company was also preparing to launch a new recruitment business insurance scheme across the UK and Europe in early 2025.

Explorer Investments' Pedro Correia de Barros cited Jove's AI-driven approach and flexibility as key reasons for leading the round, highlighting the platform's ability to address pain points in insurance that legacy providers have failed to resolve. CEO Amanda Cai said the investment would allow Jove to push further into the enterprise market, deepen automation, and continue building what she described as a fundamentally new approach to how insurance is quoted and purchased at a global level.

Sources