In this new episode, Hubert Reynier, Founding President of VISCONTI Partners, today welcomes Benoît Pastorelli, co-founder and CEO of Continuity.

Who is Benoît Pastorelli?

Benoit is one of the three co-founders of Continuity, a tech start-up that develops software in the insurance sector.

Entrepreneur and young parent, Benoit is an engineer by training. So he spent the first part of his career doing strategy consulting before finally being called back to tech by his friends and classmates.

He founded Continuity with one of his prep school friends, Pierre Beauhaire, who manages all the Techno part. The third co-founder is Antoine Sinton who manages all the Artificial Intelligence part.

How do you define Continuity?

It is a tech company that was founded in 2019. Today, it represents around thirty people. Continuity is a technological partner for insurers.

It has the particularity of being 100% specialized in one of the insurance segments: the damage insurance market for professionals, VSEs, SMEs, companies and real estate markets.

The initial observation was that insurers needed to be helped to get to know their customers better. In fact, we note that 15% of professionals' contracts no longer correspond to their activity.

This is explained by the fact that once the contract is signed, it is kept for six or seven years, without being updated, while the company concerned will evolve. When there is a disaster, it creates a losing situation for both parties.

Continuity therefore helps insurers get to know their customers better. To do this, they process all the available information on policyholders and companies, and enrich it with the help of AI, to put it at the service of insurers. In order to allow them to better select the risk and profile of SMEs from the start, in order to better monitor it over time.

How does a tech company work? What is tech culture?

Tech culture comes from the profiles of the team. The three co-founders of Continuity have engineering or scientific profiles. Benoit is in charge of business development, Pierre is in charge of the product and Antoine is in charge of the Machine Learning part.

When we talk about a deep tech box, it is never a single techno component that answers the solution. To be able to deliver the use case, engineering must first of all be done.

So create a data platform that will allow you to aggregate several different data sources, to create all the pipes so that all these sources can be refreshed automatically, to automate processes... the data engineering part is very present.

Then, all this data must be able to talk to each other. For this, algorithms will be used. This stage is the first use of AI to improve data quality.

Algorithms will also be used to create proprietary databases. Continuity's work therefore consists in aggregating a lot of micro-service modules so that, when an insurance company is equipped, it can immediately assess the risk.

Continuity is, after all, cutting-edge technology that is very easy to use.

What do Continuity customers think?

Continuity sells to major insurance groups. So between the person who decides to take their solution and the person who uses it, there can be several hierarchical levels.

• On the user side: an underwriter is there to support distribution networks (brokerage, general agents, etc.) to assess the risk profile of companies. For him, this solution makes his work much easier.
• On the decision maker side: in a large group, the sales strategy is different. Large groups are not in the mood to invest in software, so we must show them that there is a priority need in line with their strategic objectives and provide them with a solution. The need in question may be either a profitability problem or a growth problem.

Continuity must therefore manage both the decision maker, the user and the hierarchical levels between them.

The question of the decision-making period then comes into play, what relationship does this create between a start-up and large groups?

Continuity decided from the start to be a technological partner for major insurance groups.

So they knew what to expect, that the decision-making processes were going to be complex and that between five and ten people would have to be aligned before a decision could be reached.

What is interesting is how some potential investors look when they raise funds.

They see a robust business model on which to write a profitability trajectory, on the other hand they also see that the company sells to insurers, a sector that takes the longest to make decisions.

Benoit and his collaborators are therefore always thinking about how to shorten these decision-making cycles. To do this, they worked on several keys that impact the value proposition and the product:

• Be sure to be on a priority need
• Know how to enable a large group to make sure that it works. The product must therefore be able to be deployed without doing any IT integration. And their compliance, regulatory, and IT security documentation must be ready and solid.

The proposal to large groups is to provide them with a solution. It is therefore necessary to prove yourself in terms of the use of their solution. Once this is done, large groups will question the possibility of continuing with them or of internalizing.

Continuity's raison d'être is to be able to prove that they have a solution that will be more efficient and less expensive.

In five years, what will Continuity be?

They have a strong ambition for Continuity: to be the leader in B2B risk assessment at scale and remotely. This need for risk assessment is present in all sectors.

There is also a desire to expand internationally but there is a constraint: their customers are international, they therefore already have the obligation to consider themselves as a global company.

Their competitive universe is not only located in France, but all over the world. Once this observation is made, what does it mean to be a French tech company that has the ambition to expand internationally and transform a sector?

Continuity has the ambition to use technology and artificial intelligence to bring a transformative impact on the insurance business. They have the particularity of being French and that comes with its advantages and disadvantages.

The big advantage is the pool of available and global talent. It's a huge competitive advantage. You must therefore be able to activate this lever. Then, in the challenges that this implies, there is the question of why there are no big start-ups in France unlike in the US.

In the answer to this question, there is the problem of access to public spending and to the spending of large groups. European startups receive far fewer large multi-year contracts than American start-ups.

But Continuity is fortunate to have great reference investors who are also committed to bringing out European leaders on these topics with global impact.

For 2025 and beyond, this means international development, development of new offers, how far will Continuity go?

Today, Continuity has made the strategic choice to focus on the French market to start. Today, they work with more than a dozen leading players in the market.

Despite everything, they are currently in the process of raising funds in order to be able to invest in two things: an area of international expansion and an expansion of their solution to have even more impact on their customers.

Today, they need to reinvest technologically in order to be able to address the mid-cap market and major risks in a broader way. There is a significant market potential and a very strong demand from their customers.

Their business model requires them to be ever more ambitious and to expand their offer. Because in order to exist with their customers, they must remain a “subject of general management”.

The coach's three tips

Three important points of vigilance to remember:

• Decision-making processes;
• Sovereignty;
• The concept of multifaceted tech: there is never only one solution to reach the objective.