Why Achmea looks beyond the idea when choosing founders

so what do you do in your daytime job

A lot of different things.

The main thing being is that we look for founders to build startups with us.

So I look for people who come in with a great idea, who need our help or want our help turning that idea into something real.

And Achmea itself is an insurance in the Netherlands.

Yes.

So how did it come about that they are so actively looking for startups?

Yeah, that's a good question.

So it started three years ago, three or four years ago, with an idea to unlock different income streams, to learn from how innovation is.

If you work on innovation, you learn from that, right? And then you can try and implement it within a core organization perhaps as well.

And we started off like how most corporates, I think, start off is by building an IDs factory.

So you... throw a couple of people in there and you tell them to just work on innovation, just try and come up with new ideas, new solutions for problems, mostly within sort of fields adjacent to the core organization.

That doesn't really work at all.

So we pivoted quite aggressively and we decided to become a fully fledged startup studio where we build startups that don't necessarily have anything to do with the core products of Achmea.

but where we can add value and where there is societal impact to be made as well.

And we can add value in many different ways.

Of course, we have a lot of customers.

We have a lot of data.

We have, for example, we have a legal department.

So if we have, you know, massive legal department.

So if we have a startup that would otherwise spend, you know, two, 300K alone in legal advice, for example, on how to, you know, how could you build something like that? How can you create a contract with a party if it's highly sensitive, et cetera? We can step in there.

So it, you know, there's no one size fits.

So it's not like a clear answer to how we can add value.

We try and look for something where we can add value.

Then we build independent startups from there.