After recently announcing the first close of Insurtech Gateway’s Seed Fund II, our London team are excited and proud to announce the arrival of our newest team member, Dom Nolan. Dom joins as Head of Deal Flow and will be leading the team’s deal origination and investment processes, looking for the most driven, innovative and ambitious founders to back. After spending nearly four years at London-based Outward VC where he focused on new fintech related investments, Dom will continue looking for founders solving large-scale emerging problems, disrupting existing markets and creating new markets altogether. But at Insurtech Gateway there will be a focus on finding founders using insurance principles in risk reduction, mitigation and transfer combined with new technology and system design to create complete solutions to new and growing protection gaps in business, climate and health. Dom started off his career with experience at UBS and Morgan Stanley, before turning to Venture and never looking back. Aside from his time spent in the London venture ecosystem, Dom is a national standard runner with a 5km time of 13:53. Last year, he represented England for the first time!
What led you to Insurtech Gateway?
I’d spent just shy of four years looking into fintech and ‘fintech-adjacent’ sectors, with Insurtech fitting into the latter. Over that time, I naturally found myself becoming more interested in working with earlier stage companies, so the Gateway’s FCA regulated incubator model (sitting alongside the Fund) caught my eye – working with founders from the ‘pen and paper’ phase and tangibly adding value by securing regulatory permissions and underwriting capacity. When I met some of the Gateway team, it felt like a great gel with free-flowing conversation on market activity and new ideas. I’d already spoken with many of the Fund I portfolio founders whilst at Outward VC, so there was already some kind of connection there.
The Insurtech market seems big enough to find global category leaders (42 new unicorns in recent years, $17bn total funding in 2021), yet small enough to be able to nail deal coverage, at least domestically, for now. When blending deal coverage with deep team domain expertise of the team, Insurtech Gateway seem perfectly positioned to run a globally leading model. Fund I is on track to be a huge success, and Fund II is ready to start deploying, an exciting prospect.
What was your favourite investment at Outward?
Tough, but I’d have to go for Peppy which was led at Seed, with Vauban (recently acquired by Carta) coming a close second. Peppy is a B2B2C employee wellbeing platform enabling direct access to qualified practitioners in verticals such as menopause / fertility / mental health. To summarise, 1. Rockstar co-founding team with distinct roles, 2. Addressing a large underserved and overlooked market 3. Efficient and relentless sales strategy via direct outbound and Health Insurance providers. I’m excited to see how they continue to scale, though will be watching from afar now.
Have you ever done something bonkers that paid off?
When I was 12 years old, I got my first job as the local paperboy which meant waking up before school every day to deliver the round on my bike – 7 days a week at £20 / week (yes, week), 6:00am starts and some very cold days. During Xmas, my Dad and I planned to plant Xmas cards with everyone’s papers, signed ‘From Dom, your paperboy’. In the following week of shifts I had made more money within return cards than I did during my entire time there. Sweets galore. A friendly reminder to sometimes work smarter, not harder! Bonkers? Far from. But hey, it paid off.
Get in touch
If you’d like to connect, don’t hesitate to reach out to Dom directly on LinkedIn!