“We’re proud alumni of ventureLAB,” Mark Morrisette, Foxquilt CEO. “When you’re a startup, you risk everything to build the infrastructure of a business. You need support. Innovation spaces are great for building necessary community and collaboration among entrepreneurs.”
Conceptualized as an insurance-as-a-service platform that includes underwriting and ratings, Foxquilt empowers small businesses and B2B networks to customize coverage plans.
“Legacy players use old technology stacks, providing customers a one-size-fits-all insurance product, with all of the bells and whistles included,” Mark says, which is not only expensive, but also means small businesses are likely paying for services they don’t even need. “Our idea was to disrupt the industry by building a back-end machine and digital platform that would give them the freedom and power to access bespoke products at a fair value that fits with their business wherever it is in its life cycle.”
Today, the platform empowers more than 200 professions to instantly receive an insurance policy online. All that’s required is for an owner to fill out an application form that can recognize their company’s needs and recommend specific plans. The whole process takes, on average, five minutes. And because Foxquilt’s backend system enables underwriting to interact with market fluctuations real-time, it improves the overall user experience and allows customers to be nimble.
“We’re in growth mode now,” says Mark, discussing the company’s plans for 2022. “We’re in the second stage of our life cycle, distributing across B2B, B2C, SaaS; we’re continually releasing new products. We’re doing some big partnerships around distribution. And we’ve expanded our efforts in Canada and into the United States.”
That’s all to say, Foxquilt is on the verge of being a major North American success story, one that wouldn’t have been possible without the support of the community the founders met while they were a part of ventureLAB. Mark and Foxquilt’s CFO Karim Jamal joined ventureLAB back in 2016.
“When we first joined the organization, it gave us so many things,” Mark notes. “We were self-starters, but started small. We needed access to a home base that provided us with some subsidies and that was in a good location to attract future talent.We also wanted to connect with people who we could talk to about raising capital.”
Mark says the support he and his team received from like-minded entrepreneurs was invaluable, and suggests anyone who is looking to build a startup in Canada get involved with an innovation space.
“If you have a vision, and your intuition and instincts say you have a successful business model and you’ve tested your thesis on a small scale, you have to find ways to push through some of the challenges within the Canadian tech ecosystem and to find support,” Mark says.
About ventureLAB
ventureLAB is a leading global founder community for hardware technology and enterprise software companies in Canada. Located at the heart of Ontario’s innovation corridor in York Region, ventureLAB is part of one of the biggest and most diverse tech communities in Canada. Our initiatives focused on raising capital, talent retention, commercializing technology and IP, and customer acquisition have enabled thousands of companies to create over 4,500 jobs and raise more than $200 million in investment capital. At ventureLAB, we grow globally competitive tech titans that build-to-scale in Canada, for global markets.
