Venture capital-backed insurance success stories have risen at a regular drumbeat over the last few years: 2011 brought the billion-dollar Esurance acquisition, 2012 brought the wildly successful Guidewire IPO, 2013 brought the large Climate Corporation acquisition and 2014-2015 brought Zenefits to prominence. Each of these companies pulls a piece of the insurance industry kicking and screaming into a more modern age. This year, many more of these companies are poised to succeed. Insurance carriers have moved from resisting online and direct insurance sales to partnering with and investing in companies like CoverHound, Metromile and PolicyGenius. Complex data analytics tools like Hadoop and Spark now enable the use of more sophisticated datasets in real-time underwriting.

http://techcrunch.com/2016/02/19/the-next-billion-dollar-insurer/