Cover Genius, an embedded insurance company that sells protection products through online platforms, acquired Friendsurance, a Berlin insurtech that provides digital bancassurance technology to banks and insurers. The companies announced the deal on July 28, 2026.
The acquisition took effect immediately. Financial terms were not disclosed.
The Friendsurance team is joining Cover Genius, and the companies said Friendsurance's existing and prospective customers would get access to the combined group's protection products and infrastructure. The deal is aimed mainly at banks in the DACH region of Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
What Friendsurance built
Friendsurance was founded in Berlin in 2010. Its current business is technology that lets banks, fintechs and insurers offer insurance products inside digital banking services. The company says it has nearly 150,000 customers.
Cover Genius said Friendsurance had spent more than a decade building its technology, its network of bank relationships and its compliance capabilities for selling insurance through European banks.
Its systems use PSD2 open-banking connections and were designed for European data-protection rules, including the GDPR, known in Germany as the DSGVO. Cover Genius said this helps banks and fintechs avoid regulatory problems that can delay digital product launches.
The company started with a different model. In its early years, customers joined online groups that paid small claims from a shared pool, with larger claims passed to traditional insurers. Money left in the pool was returned to members as cashback. By 2016 Friendsurance said it worked with more than 70 German insurance partners. It later repositioned itself around digital bancassurance.
“We built Friendsurance to solve a clear friction point.”
The founders and the funding
Tim Kunde is co-founder and chief executive of Friendsurance. Sebastian Herfurth was named as a co-founder and managing director in 2016 reporting.
In 2016 the company said it had added more than 200 customers a day during 2015 and had as many customers as a mid-sized German insurer.
Friendsurance had publicly disclosed about $23 million in funding. In 2014 it raised an undisclosed sum, reported to be in the millions of euros, from Horizons Ventures, the investment firm of Li Ka-shing, and Australia's VantageFund, with existing investors including e.ventures also taking part. Further rounds were not detailed in the sources reviewed.
Why Cover Genius is buying
Cover Genius describes the deal as a move toward what it calls Bancassurance 2.0, where protection products are built into banking apps and data instead of being sold mainly through cross-selling. Chief executive and co-founder Angus McDonald said banks in the DACH region were under pressure to move beyond legacy cross-selling.
McDonald said European banking was one of the highest-conviction growth opportunities in embedded protection. The companies said embedded products can give banks a source of non-interest revenue while offering customers protection that fits into the services they already use.
Kunde said banks wanted to offer modern protection products but were held back by legacy systems and compliance requirements, and that joining Cover Genius would give Friendsurance's people and technology global scale and resources.
Cover Genius operates in more than 60 countries and all 50 US states. It says it has protected more than 73 million customers through 240 million policies, with $3.2 billion in gross written sales. Its distribution partners include Klarna, Revolut, Stripe, Priceline, Booking.com, eBay and Uber. Its products include the XCover and rentalcover platforms and the XCLAIM and BRIGHTWRITE microservices.
What happens to customers
Friendsurance's bank and insurer clients were not named. Cover Genius said existing and prospective Friendsurance customers would gain access to its wider product range and infrastructure. Neither company said whether the Friendsurance brand would be kept or how many staff were moving across.
Cover Genius is a licensed insurance provider in many jurisdictions and already distributes products for travel and commerce companies such as Agoda, Turkish Airlines and Tongcheng Travel. Friendsurance adds bank partnerships in Europe to that mix of travel, commerce and fintech platforms.
