Never Too Late To Startup: Building Insurtech with Rosaline Koo, CXA Group
We love rooting for the underdog- but what does it really take to rise despite the odds, as THE underdog? Rosaline Koo founded CXA Group from her living room in 2013 after a storied career with multinationals, with ambitions to transform health benefits for employees. Tune in to her story from risking all her family savings to build her startup; to scaling to over a million users, raising over $50M from the likes of Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin's B Capital Group, EDBI, Openspace Ventures and more.
"You can imagine the guilt - here I was building my startup when my actual baby was not coping well in school; with a learning disability, and recent epilepsy incident."
👊🏻 5 THINGS YOU'LL LEARN:
- How an underdog emerged to challenge global insurance players
- The opportunity for digitization in insurtech
- How to actually expand into new markets
- The sacrifice of a founder- the toll on personal relationships
- Building for the long run
⏳ TIMESTAMPS
00:00 - Intro, what's on tap for this week
03:24 - Rosaline's life "a series of accidents", from a father that came to the US on a Dragon Boat
12:34 - "I think I needed to help execute" - startup journey begins in Malaysia
13:11 - A mother's guilt
15:29 - Coming to a hard decision
18:50 - Taking all of the family's savings to start CXA
22:52 - Taking the leap: being bold enough to solve an industry problem
29:28 - Acquisition strategy: going head to head as a no-name brand
50:18 - Billion Dollar Questions!
About Rosaline Koo
Rosaline is the founder and CEO of CXA group, Asia’s only integrated flex and wellness portal.
Rosaline invested $5M of her savings and borrowed another $5M to build CXA after 5 years trying to convince her previous firm to invest in Asia. Now CXA has over a million users across 20 countries in Asia and is being white-labelled as the SME bancassurance SAAS platform. CXA has been awarded Insurtech of the Year, Top CEO, Global Innovations in Healthcare, Asian Human Capital Leadership Award, Asian Insurance Innovations and HR Vendor of the Year for Corp Wellness and Comp & Benefits.
Rosaline supervised Procter & Gamble factory lines in Iowa and then worked at Bankers Trust on Wall Street. She launched two dot-com start-ups before moving to ACE insurance. Rosaline also grew Mercer Marsh Benefits' 14 APAC countries 800% over 8 years. She graduated from UCLA Cybernetics and Columbia Business School.
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𝐁𝐢𝐥𝐥𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐃𝐨𝐥𝐥𝐚𝐫 𝐌𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐬
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