[Startup story] Senflua | Rubik Garage Accelerator spring of 2023

[Startup story] Senflua | Rubik Garage Accelerator spring of 2023

June 2, 2023

Senflua is one of the 24 startups selected in the 2023 spring cohort of Rubik Garage Accelerator, from over 170 applicants from all over the world. Discover its story below. 

First of all, we would like to know who’s behind the keyboard.

We, Tiberiu Marin, Gabriel Prefac & Valentin Tudose represent Senflua, probably the first & only Insurtech player in Romania. We came all from different backgrounds as Tiberiu is a serial Entrepreneur with Sales expertise, Gabriel comes with experience in Insurance and IT Project management and I (Valentin) developed know-how in Customer Experience and Business Transformation. 

Tell us more about your startup. What problem do you solve? Who’s your audience?

Senflua is an emerging Insurtech (100% online insurer). We are currently a digital insurance agent, through which RCA/MTPL and Travel policies can be issued, without human interaction, 100% digital. We will also integrate the API for Home Insurance. In principle, we address digital natives, but the simple digital experience has the role of facilitating access for all customers in the market. 

What motivated you to create this startup? What’s your „why”?

Let me tell you the real reason for Senflua’s creation. When I moved back to Romania a few years ago and I was looking for health insurance I couldn’t find anything that was covering preventive care. That was the moment we met with Tiberiu and Gabriel and outlined the same need on the market. Simple, digital & customizable products insurance products. We see a high potential to develop this side of the insurance market as today it is not addressed at all by the classic insurers and brokers.  

How is your startup different from competitors?

We differentiate ourselves through an innovative and, at the same time, very simple customer experience. In the second stage, we will create a digital insurance wallet, a unique product on the market at both national and European levels. Here, both B2B and B2C customers will be able to import their insurance policies even if they were not issued by Senflua but by other market players, on which they will be able to have an overview of the degree of risk coverage for their needs (we call this 360 health check).

Tell us more about your team. 

Senflua is based on three co-founders, with very well-defined roles:

• Valentin Tudose – Marketing, Sales, Brokerage, Customer Support, Claim Management
• Gabriel Prefac – Software development, Software Infrastructure
• Tiberiu Marin – Developing and executing strategies in Customer Experience, Customer Operations, and Sales for large global corporate customers.

What are your plans for your startup in the next 6-12 months?

For the rest of the year 2023, we aim for a turnover of 100,000 lei, based on the fact that we have just finished implementing automation for different types of insurance, which will streamline the process of issuing policies in a self-service mode, so our clients will save time.

What are the biggest rewards of being a startup founder?

When you develop a startup, the rewards are the skills you acquire along the way. You become more responsible, more organized, more disciplined, and the list can go on. Then of course another reward is when the market buys your service or product and you realize that you contribute to your customers’ wellbeing. 

What about the biggest challenges?

The biggest challenge we see today for Senflua is that it evolves within one of the last industries that didn’t suffer a radical transformation. Insurance in Romania compared to other industries (finance, etc.) is still run in a very structured and old style with little room for disruptive innovation. In consequence, our main challenge will be to showcase the new possibilities we could bring thanks to technology in the field of insurance and to develop a pedagogical approach in order to increase awareness among our potential clients.

What made you apply to our Rubik Garage accelerator?

The need to challenge our concept and access a broad range of experts in order to be able to build the best solution for the insurance market. 

Top 3 learnings of the accelerator until now?

Building resilience and mental toughness mindset is the Sales strategy that during the economic downturn will help us with Cashflow optimizations 🙂

In other words, we learned that it is very important to have a clear vision of our North Star objective as the path to getting it might be composed of multiple flexible scenarios based on external factors that we don’t control. 

How was the bootcamp for you?

The fact that we were invited to be part of this bootcamp is, above all, an honor! So thank you for that! The 3 days spent at Piatra Neamt were the fire we needed to step up! This experience helped us outline our idea, we received very good advice from Valentin Toc, which we implemented in our plan. So all in all it was a real success for us and gave us even more energy and motivation to continue to dream big. 

What do you like in the Rubikorns Startup Community?

First of all, we want to thank you for the opportunity to be part of this project! What we can say right now is that we are truly amazed by the strength and motivation of your team. We feel guided as if by our own family, there is a lot of attention to detail and a great openness to learning. The most beautiful feeling is to be surrounded by people with the same habits, with whom you can talk freely about your dreams, without being considered crazy:)

What message do you have for other startup founders?

Don’t worry about failure, you only have to be right once.

Is there anything else you’d like our readers to know?

To those who are with us by the simple fact that they read the interviews, we want to thank them and say that they can confidently recommend the Rubik Garage projects to their loved ones, who have soulful projects but do not have the courage to turn them into a startup. People from everywhere…don’t be great…be awesome.

We encourage you to support Senflua and follow its journey on Linkedin and Facebook.

Stay tuned to discover the story behind the other startups from our accelerator! #WeAreInThisTogether

Rubik Garage is an equity-free acceleration program aiming to support startups from CEE get to their first paying customer, raise investment or go international.