Find Matheus Riolfi on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mriolfi
JC: Welcome, everyone to another episode of The Future ofBizTech. I’m your host, JC Grainger, I have another fantastic guest with us on the show today. And listen to me and I’m loving this episode, please show your love and appreciation by following this podcast, wherever you’re listening, be sure to give it a five star review, preferably with some nice comments because that is how other techies like you and I find cool podcasts like this. So today, I have the absolute pleasure of interviewing Matheus Riolfi, who is the co founder and CEO of tint.ai. Matheus, thank you so much for being on the show. I want you to tell the audience a little bit about yourself, and and what is it you guys do?
Matheus: Hi, JC, thank you so much for having me. Yeah. So as you mentioned, I’m the co founder and CEO of Tint, we help tech platforms embed insurance into their products. So think about the last time you use Airbnb or Uber, you don’t even think about it. But there’s actually the insurance being transacted with your service. And that’s a little bit of what helps like no, we will make easy for any tech platform to make insurance as part of their product and services. So they can sell more, they can get more profitability out of it.
JC: So let’s talk about that. I found this very fascinating, because I haven’t seen anything like this, right. And I’m a tech guy, I see a lot of stuff. And I thought this was interesting. I want to dive a little deeper into that. So give me an example. So and here’s, here’s the way I see it. But I want to I don’t know if I’m wrong here. So when you’re saying that a company can offer insurance to its customers, for the use of their platform, is that like saying, If I’m using an email marketing software, and it accidentally sends out the email with the token of first name, instead of the actual name, I say, Well, what the hell? And there’s an insert, like I guess, you know, give me an example of where the insurance comes in and what types of platforms people typically would want to see this on.
Matheus: Yeah, absolutely. So let’s get an example of a real customer that is public, there’s a company called “Neighbor”, which is like, think about Airbnb for storage. So you can rent out your garage space for somebody else. And they can leave their things, their car, boxes, whatever it is. And we help “Neighbor” create a kind of protection product that, you know, if you leave your things in storage, something happens, it’s broken, there’s water damage, whatever may happen, you get paid, right? So the idea is that of all the companies we will work with, by making insurance a feature of their products, they actually kind of the value of the product and service increases to the customers right so at the beginning of the show, I thought about our mentioned Airbnb idea. So if there’s damage now you can rent out your place on Airbnb, there is damage as the host you get paid because Airbnb got some insurance in place. So imagine Airbnb now have to go and convince people to let strangers come to their house, we know assurance and saying, by the way, if something wrong happens, and it will happen, it’s your problem. Like if you are by yourself, so like obviously, the service wouldn’t work without that protection.
JC: Okay, now that makes sense. That again, I was thinking Airbnb when you were saying like that, maybe were one. What about other digital types of like, what about software platforms of use for b2b Right, because those are more b2c? So I understand a consumer need for insurance. Can you give us an example of a b2b style one?
Matheus: Absolutely. So we see a huge trend in a lot of different vertical SaaS platforms. So vertical SaaS B– those companies were businesses can run their operations. So again, one of our customers called guest T, they help property managers rent out their spaces in our Airbnb verbal are many different channels. So they can run their calendars they can run their cleaning, like all those kinds of services that you need to do to manage the property on guests, your guests is the fact of the operating system. So what we do we work with those kinds of companies to help them protection as one part of the stack that they offer, because now they’re covering one more necessity that the business will have and the beauty like that we’ve seen with this vertical SaaS and others is that they know the customer very well they have a great relationship so they already paid to acquire that customer. So it’s literally the insurance distribution insurance or the the protection product comes as a net profit that kind of center to to those companies.
JC: That’s cool. So I was I was looking at your website, which like I have over here to my other screen there wasn’t sees me going. Oh, yeah, I was I was looking at some other stuff here to tell me about how your system decides how the insurance let’s say numbers work. I mean, it’s Tint.ai, right? So there’s an artificial intelligence somewhere in here. Let’s talk about the tech like the fun stuff, the tech stuff, like how is it deciding and figuring out what to charge what to cover things like that? Sure. So
Matheus: We the way we work because that we do three main things to those companies right as a way to provide this end to end solution to help them create their own embedded protection products. So we help them with all the technology. So as you mentioned, all the court systems that need that run in the background, from who sees what price, what price they cease? Who do we keep track of who purchase? What if there is a damage, like how does this person get paid? Like all those things, these were kind of our software stack. And then we also help those companies with now the back office and compliance. Now insurance is a highly regulated space. So there are a lot that goes behind the scenes to make that happens in the right way. And then we also help those companies can transfer the risk. So getting some insurance or reinsurance partners that would actually take the risk of those companies work. Now, if we double click on the softer part, which is more and more the AIP is that we can support any pricing logic. And we work with actuaries we work with some of the kind of data and actuary folks to come up with like, what’s the right price that should be charged for the users and we have everything from the same price for everybody very simple, all the way through using machine learning some sophisticated algorithms to try to come up with this pricing.
JC: Can people set their own pricing? Or is it just based off the model from your, your software?
Matheus: It’s a combination of both, we typically can provide some expertise in some guidance, but we we have a partnership with our customers where they eventually control the customer, they control the user expertise. So they are welcome to tweak some of those kind of pricing suggestions that we can may come up with.
JC: Nice. Okay, so what motivated you to start this company? I mean, like, what kind of history do you have? Were you working for some insurance company and you’re like, This is crap, and I need to I need to make the system better. I mean, like, just what was your motivation for even creating this?
Matheus: And I think you’re right, so that was a little bit of motivation. So I mean, as most people work in insurance, I didn’t, I came to this path a little bit by accident. So I joined I am originally from Brazil, graduated from business school. And I joined a company called Turo, a peer to peer car sharing marketplace. Now, it’s up to the moment. Yeah, it’s a multi billion dollar business now. But when I joined the was not 15 People startup. And a turns out like I was leading international expansion.
JC: I hope you kept your stock options, by the way.
Matheus: I did. It I did exercise them. Then also there were I spent four years with the company. But yeah, my job was to launch the business abroad. And 80% of my time was spent understanding insurance of the city how things were working in Canada and the UK, a friends in many other countries. And you know, in parallel, my co founder, who was also an early employee at Turo was the head of data science. So he was coming up with the models, this pricing logics that you did you ask for the data talked about. And we realize the same problem and opportunity right there put the problem that the opportunity was that Turo was no coming, launching and processing hundreds of millions of dollars of insurance premiums or protection fees, as they call it. So we’re seeing the clear benefit. And the business really couldn’t exist without this, this this insurance protection. But we also saw how hard it was for a company that is not in the core business of insurance. That doesn’t happen software engineers that are dedicated to this piece of the business, like how hard it was for them to actually make things work. So that’s really what inspired us to start tends to make ease, you know, really at the product that we wish existed when we were working into and creating similar products for them.
JC: Very cool. Does this apply to any kind of service based, right? Because I’ve so far what I’m hearing, it’s more about when there’s products or something at risk, which makes sense for insurance. But let’s say for example, like I’m dating girl who owns a talent agency right now, so every now and then something can happen in a client can, let’s say pay to have talent show up for a certain gig. But something could happen and that talent either doesn’t make it or they maybe they break something while they’re there. Who knows. Right? Yeah, yeah. Would your insurance work for a business like that? Or a business like mine, like marketing? Right? If marketing goes bad, like if an advertising agency puts out something that is false advertising, for example, by accident or on purpose? Who knows? Can that be covered through what you’re doing? So how about service based industries?
Matheus: Absolutely. So there were for example, we have one of our customers, it’s called “deal”. So they help companies hire contractors abroad and they provide all the contracts, the payments, like all everything you need to have a contract are working for you in a country outside the US. And we worked with them to create what is called misclassification guarantee. So basically, if deal tells you it’s okay to hire this person, say in Italy as a contractor, and it turns out, they’re wrong. And then this person is suing you fall misclassification, like, I was saying that they actually he or she was an employee, not a contractor, this coverage is protection from deal will pay the legal fees up to a certain amount. So this is an example of the appears service where it can the protection can work in your example of the of the talent, and then when we are thinking is like, as a business, what are the risks that your customer has, when they are contracting you that if you were to get those risks to go away, you would sell more, that is the mostly the ultimate way of thinking about embedded insurance and better protection. Because there’s, there’s a clear risk in this case, the risk is like your talent, breaking something, can’t lay down your structure product and saying, by the way, you can have a pre premium tier of my service that if that were to happen, then you know, you, you are covered up to X amount and..
JC: And if they deny the coverage, and in a way that can also maybe protect the business from lawsuits like, hey, we gave them a chance to cover this. And they did. And now that may not work in every state, but I could see a legal argument. If you offer insurance, if something goes wrong, it might help you in a lawsuit. If you’re sued for the thing that went wrong, that they denied that they declined the coverage for.
Matheus: Yeah, I think, you know, we the way we work normally with those things like we have a compliance department and with the legal team that will kind of go to the bottom of this and know the exact use case know exactly what’s happening to just confirm, like what or not say, well, you’re saying it’s right. But the principle seems to apply, right, which is the you you’re naming that risk. And then in a way, you’re kind of offering the ability to go away. So that’s a good, okay, it’s a good way of being transparent. And the reality is like your customers, if the risk is real, your customers are already thinking about it. And in our case, like a lot of our prospects that when they come to us, they’re already hearing from their customers, that there is a pain point. So those are the kind of the best use cases for us when he’s like, No, you’re already hearing, you’re already dealing with that pain. So we help you transform that pain into a profit center, or it’s something that not only protects your customer, but also can accelerate your growth and your profitability.
JC: Very cool. So I’m a marketing guy by by trade. Right. So my next question is, how are you guys getting the word out there about? I mean, you’re on a podcast, that’s one thing, right? You got a PR angle, right? But beyond that, are you guys doing like paid ads, social media, SEO? I mean, what kind of things do you use to get out into the market,
Matheus: We do have, like some PR related efforts or thought leadership efforts, I think it’s a very nascent industry. So there’s quite a bit of education that we do. And I think that we see that as a way to just kind of put the message, the message out there, we do have a lot of content creation. So now not necessarily talking to the ship directly, but blogs, and constantly in other channels as well, because again, relates to the education piece. We also have a direct sales force or outbound channel where we can reach out to companies and like create so we use a combination of both we don’t do a lot of pay just Yeah, we didn’t do a lot of pay in 2022, I think is absolutely in our plan for 2023 to be more aggressive on pay. But our know our hypothesis is that paid is we’re not as the plant is an industry or the vertical been such a nascent, it’s not the point yet we’re paid will be the most scale a scalable, kind of higher ROI channel, but we will start making a lot more experiments with that next year.
JC: Yeah, you have a lot to choose from, right. I mean, I just I like what you’re doing, because it’s fairly unique. I’m sure you have competitors. Everyone does, right. But I can guarantee it’s, it’s small, right? Because this this type of thing, especially with the way you do it, I think is very cool and very unique. The Future of Biz Tech Podcast, I got to ask the question, the future questions, right? First one is, where do you see the industry of this type of insurance and going right, so you and your competitors, and just in general? I mean, you know, this is something I think is going to evolve, just given where things are going. So where do you see that next five to 10 years, whether it be because of regulation or legislation, or technology or just economy? You know, where do you see the overall industry of where you’re at the evolving to.
Matheus: Yeah, we are in my point of your most exciting time in the insurance industry, since it was created hundreds of years ago, right? I know that exciting and insurance are not necessarily requirements that go together.
JC: I didn’t want to I didn’t want to say I kind of want to say it. But I was like that is like you heard it here first guys. Exciting and insurance using the same sentence. But I agree with you this because this stuff fascinates me. I like the tech side of it.,
Matheus: Yeah, no, absolutely. So what what’s happening here, right, the bigger trend of like every talking about here is that insurance is becoming a feature, not a product, right? You have now all those tech platforms. And again, we use Airbnb and Uber as examples, but those now came or 10-15 years ago, and obviously they are at scale now. But there are many examples like no Apple, Flexport, Tesla, like everywhere you look, you see known insurance companies launching their own insurance embedded insurance products, because they realize that that makes their core business better. So in a way, like think about insurance, right is this product that was created 300 years ago, that kind of looks and feels the same. And even with the Internet of like now the the beginning to the 2000s in the mobile app, in the 2010 or so it wasn’t the same product, it’s just instead of be sold by an agent on the street, it was sold by via mobile app or via website. But fundamentally the same product, same everything with embedded that changes, right? Because again, the companies are going to be the ones driving it. It’s like Apple Care is branded by Apple, it’s run by Apple, where it’s part of apple stack when you buy an iPhone, and it is a protection product, right. And in this new world, it everything changes the unit economics change, because now guy calls and progresses, the world spend 25% of the dollar that premium that you pay in premiums in advertising. So every time you have your car insurance, then you spend $10,000 a year, 250 to 300 of that go to that guy on TV that you know on the radio that you see over and over. So in this world where the customer has already been acquired, that expense is gone. Apple already paid for the iPhone advertising. So the Apple Care distribution costs is virtually all the technology like all the things that happened behind the scenes. So in 10 years, a lot of insurance products won’t be standalone anymore, there will be features of brands that people love.
JC: I liked that idea that that feature instead of a product. That’s interesting. Okay, so let’s dial down a little bit more. Now. Let’s talk about your content. Where do you see you guys in the next six to 12 months? And if you have any, like cool roadmap features, like my audience loves to hear the new stuff for us. What What can you give us? What kind of preview? Can we extract out of you today?
Matheus: Is a great question. So we know being the last few months, really laser focused on or like launching new products in the shipping vertical. Like we had a over 10 different use cases on our platform already. But we think shipping is one that was getting a lot of traction. So you’ll see a lot of our kind of next kind of rollouts coming in the shipping and shipping protection industry. And in six to 12 months, I think you should expect to see a lot on the vacation rental as well. So again, supporting the property owners who are putting their properties out for short term rentals, and making sure that when things that go wrong, and they will in a certain percentage of times they get paid and then we can keep making money with their product.
JC: That’s awesome. So thank you for those two because I I always need that in the podcast, but we got it we always got to look ahead and not just what’s what’s right here. I want to ask you a personal question. We’re gonna switch gears a little bit here. What did you want to do when you were a kid? Like what do you want to be when you grew up when you were a kid? And then is this it? Did you want to be like a tech, you know, CEO, or it wasn’t a firefighter? And then how to how did you get to here from there kind of thing.
Matheus: So I want it to be two things right? So I’m lucky that I ended up and one of the two options. I think, I wanted to be like athlete. I always love sports in general. I play again from Brazil. I played soccer from a very early age. I played tennis from early age as well. Unfortunately, it was never really good to pursue that professionally. So that was that that route was off the table. But the other route was to be a founder so I was one of those kind of kids were had the lemon stand type of things. Doing things and creating things on the side trying to monetize a few ideas here and there. So I always enjoy that. So I mean, luckily, I ended up really in one of the two options that really wanted for me in the future.
JC: So that’s great, because you know, we’d love people, some people nail it, right? And other people, like just life kind of pulls them in different directions. And you should, we should, we would adapt to, you know, changing circumstances and things like that. So that’s cool, though. I like that. I love that you’re from Brazil, my first international trip I ever did. First time I ever used my passport, I went to Rio for carnival 10 days solo. And it was wild. Oh, man, that was my first trip, like talking about diving headfirst into an empty pool, right? Like, it was nice.
Matheus: It’s probably the most intense time you can come to Brazil. So you went from zero to 1000. Right away.
JC: Yeah. And I was staying in Ipanema, right. And like right there on board, it was fantastic. So love your country, although I will say this is a warning to anyone. They have this thing out there called the Black Sun. And I’d never heard of this term, the Black Sun and I was like, what’s the black sun and I found out the hard way because I was sitting on the beach under this like abandoned thing, right? Like an umbrella cabana thing. And half of my foot was outside of the shade. Just half, maybe sitting there for 15 minutes talking to someone looked down my foot. And it is, I mean, beat red. Beat that fact that I want to have and I was like, how is that possible to get that burnt that fast? And apparently, just the humidity in the haze that’s up near, you know, when the sun’s out. They call it the black sun because you can basically burn so fast. And I was completely unprepared for that. I was like, Whoa, so so anyone listening, just make sure that you wear your sunscreen and have a lot of shade if you’re going to be out there when the Haze is out. So yeah. How can people reach you? Well, first, how can they reach the company if they want to just take out the website, whatnot? And then how can they reach you personally if they have some bigger prospect of higher end deals for you.
Matheus: So if the company came go through our website, we have many kind of forms and different ways there we do check all of them, we guarantee that you’re gonna get an answer. So that’s definitely a good place to start. If you want to reach out..
JC: It’s TINT.Ai
Matheus: Exactly, TINT.Ai. And if you want to talk with me personally, good channel can be my LinkedIn. So you can just probably search my name, you will find me and I’m also very active on LinkedIn. So be happy to chat mine.
JC: And if anyone listening has Matheus. MATHEUS, and then RIOLFI, RIOLFI correct?
Matheus: That is right.
JC: Perfect this way to try to find it on LinkedIn and make sure they don’t end up with someone else. Right?
Matheus: Yeah, yeah. The good news is that I do believe there’s only one Matheus Riolfi in the world so I think you probably not gonna get if you spell it right.
JC: Hear that ladies? He’s one of a kind. For everyone listening out there. Again, if you liked what you heard today, be sure to subscribe to the podcast and a five star rating. Put some cool comments behind it so others, like other techies like us can find it and enjoy learning about all the really cool b2b tech software on the market today. Matheus thank you so much for being on the show. And I actually look forward to talking to you after this because I have a lot of interest in your in your feature type product here soon. So thank you for coming on.
Matheus: Thank you so much JC It was a pleasure. Bye bye