"I know the series of decisions I made, even though they felt like the right decisions at the time, and they felt like no-brainers. But I had to convince so many people to change their life for me. That's what founders feel." - Rosaline Chow Koo
"It didn't take me 18 months to build the tech. It took me 8 hours to build the insurance policy extraction component. It's 100X. Three of us built what 330 of us could not build. It took 6 months to build the rest of our extensive platform which includes the auto-comparison of insurer quotes, the HR employer analytics & census upload and the end-to-end employee app." - Rosaline Chow Koo
"And we built for the three of them. And because we did for the three of them, within five years, we won 500 companies." - Rosaline Chow Koo
Rosaline Chow Koo, founder of covee and formerly of CXA, traces her path from a Procter & Gamble plant in Iowa and banking to insurance in Singapore, where she grew Mercer's Asia business 800% and went from 4 to 14 countries. She left at 51 to build CXA, a tech-led benefits brokerage that won 500 companies in five years, funded partly by her husband's $3 million. An 11-year SaaS contract with a bank, 150 contract engineers and COVID forced her to sell the brokers and the platform. She describes the shame that followed, caring for her 97-year-old mother, and why AI brought her back: three people built in eight hours what 330 could not, and she says reading a policy now takes a minute instead of 30 to 40 hours.
Rosaline founded CXA after five years trying to convince the world's largest brokerage to invest in Asia, putting in $5M of personal savings and borrowing $5M more. Grew CXA to #3 in benefits broking across Singapore, HK and China, with 500+ corporates and a million employees, winning Insurtech of the Year, the Digital Insurer Innovation Award and Global Innovations in Healthcare. Built HSBC's Benefits+ bancassurance platform for the bank's global SME customers, and sold CXA to HSBC, Pacific Prime and a China firm.
Now co-founder of covee, building what the industry never had: one AI-native platform where brokers, insurers, TPAs and providers share the same policy, census, claims and health data, so every employee gets a personal health journey and every employer can bend its cost curve.
Rosaline’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rosaline-chow-koo-212334/
Find out more about covee: https://www.covee.ai/
Show Notes
00:00 Opening: The cancer insurance question that started her vision, and the sale of the SaaS platform when COVID hit.
02:31 Early career to insurance: Born in San Francisco, factory manager at P&G, banking, the 1996 move to Singapore and how she entered insurance.
09:11 Growing Mercer in Asia: The 800% growth, and an HR head's remark in China about late-stage cancers that shaped her prevention thesis.
10:40 Leaving to build CXA: Why a $10 million request was refused, how she funded the startup, and how MAS blocked her PE backing.
27:08 Why a brokerage model: Commission funds the tech, so clients get the platform for the price of insurance; design partners and the acquired broker.
36:38 The SaaS build decision: Bank-led 11-year contract, the lost CTO, the outside tech firm, the fixed January 1 deadline and the monolith platform.
41:56 COVID and selling the company: Frozen funding, the convertible debt clock, protecting 75 employees, and selling the brokers and SaaS IP.
45:30 Shame, letting go and reset: Feeling she had betrayed investors, clients and family, the life coach, and caring for her mother in Los Angeles.
53:50 Why build again with AI: Unchanged broker pain points, AI cutting build time, and her co-founders and team at covee.
59:40 Value for brokers and insurers: Renewals she says now take a minute instead of 30 hours, claims analytics against 16.9% medical inflation, and PE-backed brokers.
1:04:00 A time she was brave: Growing up in South Central Los Angeles during the Watts riots and her family of survivors.
