On Thursday Des Moines-based Insurtech startup Pablow announced a partnership that will make their product available in the United States.
Pablow currently offers a car rental comparison website and insurance site in Australia and New Zealand. And with the partnership announced Thursday in a news release, they will launch the same model in the United States.
The availability of Allianz Global Assistance Car Rental Damage Protector will be through the P’teet website across 50 states.
Pablow was a member of the Global Insurance Accelerator in 2015 and has been based in Des Moines since the Global Insurance Accelerator three years ago.
Founder Steve Sherlock said it was two and a half years from initial contact to the launch of Pteet.com.
“To calculate in miles, just shy of 20,000,” Sherlock wrote in an email from Mexico.
Sherlock said he’s had several startups in the car rental aggregation market across the world and one reoccurring theme from customers he continued to hear was how annoying they found it when they found out the rental damage insurance charges often cost more than the rental itself.
“When I exited the car rental industry in 2011, I decided to see if we could offer consumers a specialized insurance to cover just the car rental deductible,” Sherlock said. “I had a close contact at Allianz Global Assistance in Brisbane, Australia and crunched the number and put a viability case to them, and low and behold they agreed to create a standalone car rental insurance product for us to sell to consumers.”
Sherlock said he credits the Global Insurance Accelerator for helping him understand the licensing requirement.
“Without it, we could not operate as we do today,” he said.
Sherlock said Pablow has raised capital in the Australian market and won’t need outside investors to grow the business.
“With additional resources, we aim to expand geographically with our existing car rental and vacation rental insurance models,” he said. “In time we ai to release a model that we believe will delight travelers and potentially disrupt aspects of the travel insurance distribution model.”