The Story of Foxquilt: Building the Future of Small Business Insurance

The light bulb moment for Foxquilt came from an unexpected source – a platform connecting property professionals with banks and insurance companies. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, co-founding partner Mark Morissette shared how this experience revealed a crucial gap in the insurance market.

From Problem to Opportunity

While building out Real Matters, a platform hosting 300,000 property professionals, Mark encountered a persistent challenge. “The biggest pain point for us was onboarding these guys across North America. They never had the right insurance policy,” he explains. When they reached out to legacy carriers for a solution, they were met with silence. “We figured we’d get some response, but weren’t that naive. It was a multi million dollar opportunity for these legacy carriers. Can you not integrate and embed an affinity solution into our environment as we onboard these inspectors and property professionals?”

This experience coincided with Mark’s observations from his time at Aviva Canada, one of the largest general insurance companies globally. “Back then, 2008 or nine, they were still triaging in bricks and mortar branches customers by color coded paper,” he recalls. “There was no capabilities with regards to technology and fast forward. It still has been a fairly paralyzed value chain.”

Building the Solution

Rather than following the path of first-generation insurtech companies that focused primarily on customer acquisition, Foxquilt took a different approach. “We said, okay, it’s time for insurance technologists to get in the game and focus on the value of building IP front to back,” Mark explains.

Their vision was to create what Mark describes as “a really strong proprietary product and offering that would give that emancipated offering to a small business owner agnostic to where they’re originating from.” This meant building a platform that could serve everyone from “a side hustler in their basement as an ecommerce merchant” to large B2B programs at ecommerce marketplaces.

Early Days and Evolution

The company incorporated in 2016, but as Mark notes, “There’s no success story is an overnight success story.” They wrote their first policy in 2018, starting with a direct-to-consumer approach in Canada to get close to their customers and understand their needs.

This methodical approach paid off. “We’ve only raised $25 million in canadian currency,” Mark shares, but they’ve used this capital efficiently to build their entire technology stack in-house and expand across multiple distribution channels.

Breaking New Ground

One of Foxquilt’s key innovations was creating a truly multi-operational product. As Mark explains, “A plumber, electrician or handyman and it’s all lumped into the same product. Well that’s not what they are… they do a myriad of different things. They could be doing 50% of the time doing some electrical work, but they could be doing some commercial painting, some fencing and some handyman work.”

This understanding led them to build a platform where business owners could “build out their own Persona and Ala carte product with a baseline general liability offering and then have it do it 24/7 11 o’clock at night so they can print out a certificate beyond a job site the next day.”

Looking to the Future

Today, Foxquilt serves over 8,000 clients and is writing “almost a couple of million dollars a month in revenue.” They’ve focused on building a sustainable business model, maintaining what Mark describes as “impeccable” loss ratios while scaling across multiple channels.

The company continues to expand its product offerings, with Mark noting they’ve already “released 800 different classes, 800 different product classes across three verticals.” These include personal services (from videographers to yoga studios), contractor segments, and ecommerce verticals.

Their vision extends beyond just insurance products. By building a comprehensive technology platform that can serve multiple channels and markets simultaneously, Foxquilt is positioning itself to solve the broader challenge of cross-border commerce between the US and Canada – a problem that legacy carriers have yet to address effectively.

For Mark and his team, this is just the beginning. They’re proving that with the right technology and approach, it’s possible to build an insurtech company that serves multiple channels effectively while maintaining strong underwriting fundamentals – a model that could reshape how small businesses access and manage their insurance needs.