TL;DR:
- Founder Joshua Snead identified a gap between people who love their pets and those who understand insurance, leading to the creation of Rainwalk.
- Rainwalk is transforming pet insurance by embedding policies directly at point of sale, making it easier for new pet parents to insure their pets with one click.
- Their unique distribution model, partnering with shelters and breeders, has driven strong early success and improved underwriting performance.
- Insurtech Gateway’s participation in Rainwalk’s $4M Seed round has helped Rainwalk access invaluable mentorship and industry connections.
- The U.S. pet insurance market has massive growth potential, expected to reach $10-30 billion in the next 5-7 years.
- Josh’s advice to founders: Be persistent, build strong underwriting health, and treat insurer partnerships as long-term opportunities.
Software Sales to Pet Insurance Pioneer
For Joshua Snead, a lifelong animal lover with a career in insurance technology, launching Rainwalk felt like a natural next step. He saw an untapped opportunity in the pet insurance space, driven by a powerful realisation: many of us treat our pets like family, but so few of us have insurance to protect them.
Before founding Rainwalk, Josh worked as a software sales executive at Guidewire, helping large insurance carriers improve their systems. Yet, despite his background, he was unaware of pet insurance until a chance conversation piqued his curiosity.
“I didn’t even know pet health insurance existed,”
Josh admitted. He quickly discovered that only 2% of pets in the U.S. were insured – a statistic that both shocked and inspired him.
“I realised that individuals who were a little older, and maybe had a family but no pets, didn’t really understand the evolving relationship the younger generation were having with our pets,” Josh shared. “There was a gap between people who knew insurance and people who loved their pets, but I could bridge that gap.”
A Breakthrough in Distribution
For Rainwalk to achieve its mission of making pet insurance more accessible, Josh knew he had to rethink how pet insurance was sold. Instead of relying on traditional marketing, Josh envisioned a more seamless, tech-enabled approach. The solution? Embedded pet insurance at the point of sale.
Josh explained, “We use technology to help businesses who never expected they could sell pet insurance become distribution channels. By embedding insurance directly into the shelters and breeders sales systems, Rainwalk enables new pet parents to sign up with just one click. For them, it unlocks a new revenue stream, and for us, it opens up a whole new customer base that might never have thought about pet insurance.”
This unique distribution model has been a game-changer, with Rainwalk’s conversion rates already outperforming industry norms.
A Eureka Moment
One of Rainwalk’s biggest breakthrough moments came from an early partnership with a shelter software company that was looking for a pet insurer to integrate with. Josh recalls, “They had talked to over a dozen pet health insurers, but none of them had the technology or expertise to create an API integration. And we showed up with one already built, looking for someone just like them to partner with.”
This strategic partnership validated Rainwalk’s thesis: the right technology, delivered at the right time, could solve the access problem pet insurance had long faced. From there, the mission was clear: scale this model to other partners and provide best in class pet insurance to their customers.
Future-Focused Pet Insurance
Looking ahead, Rainwalk’s focus is on growth. “Our first pillar is continuing to innovate around distribution – finding new ways to embed pet insurance into the places where pet owners are already spending time,” Josh explained. But he’s also keenly aware of the importance of delivering on the customer experience. “If we want to be a market leader, we have to provide best-in-class coverage and customer service,” he said.
That’s where Rainwalk’s partnerships with major insurers and reinsurers come in. Working with Allianz and Convex, they’ve developed a model that allows them to access key data, like medical records, which improves their underwriting capabilities. Rainwalk’s loss ratios have been strong from the beginning, a point Josh knows is critical when building trust with insurers.
“Our distribution model gives us really unique access to data, which has helped generate healthy underwriting performance.”
A $30 Billion Opportunity
With only 2% of pets currently insured in the U.S., the potential for growth is staggering. “We believe this market could easily reach $10-30 billion in the next five to seven years. To achieve that we only need to reach an adoption level similar to comparable western economies, where it’s not uncommon for pet insurance penetration to be in the 15% to 30% range.” Josh said.
The Role of Insurtech Gateway
At Insurtech Gateway we had been observing the pet market for many years, knowing that it was a massively underserved market, but insurtech founders have always struggled with traction. When we met Josh and saw the growth Rainwalk had already achieved with their unique distribution strategy we jumped at the opportunity to support their $4 million Seed round earlier this year.
“Insurtech Gateway didn’t just provide funding; they brought us a wealth of expertise and some really awesome connections. The most impactful introductions they made was to other pet insurance founders who’d walked this road before us. Being able to learn from their successes – and their mistakes – has been invaluable,” Josh noted. In the high pressure environment of Venture Capital funded startups, these insights have helped Rainwalk avoid common pitfalls and accelerate their growth.
Advice for Founders
For fellow insurtech founders, Josh’s advice is clear: persistence is everything.
“Persistence is both the most powerful tool of a founder and also sometimes the most difficult thing to do,”
he reflected. “When it comes to partnering with large insurers, patience is key. I’d say treat partnerships with insurance carriers, especially large ones, as long-term opportunities. They rarely happen quickly, so it’s important to have other smaller, faster-moving partnerships to support your growth while you wait for the big deals.”
His second piece of advice? Nail your underwriting story early on. “Underwriters really care about underwriting health, and if you can demonstrate strong performance from day one, it’s much easier to build those relationships.”
Get in touch
At Insurtech Gateway, we’re passionate about backing mission-driven founders like Josh who are solving real-world problems with creative solutions. Rainwalk is a perfect example of what’s possible when technology, insurance, and empathy come together.
If you’re an early-stage founder with a game-changing idea please get in touch.