PARIS — Grace, a French fintech start-up offering coverage solutions for theft or loss of luxury goods, announced Thursday it had raised 5.9 million euros in seed funding.
The investment round was led by venture capital firms FinTech Collective and Speedinvest, with significant participation from Firstminute Capital, Purple, Kima Ventures, Bpifrance, as well as a16z and Sequoia through their scout program and strategic angel investors.
The funds will support the Paris-based platform’s goal of covering over 200,000 luxury items by the end of 2025, serving to further develop its technology, including an AI-powered antifraud protocol, scale up its tools and bolster its teams. Grace’s 20-strong team will grow to 25 by the end of the year and up to 40 by the end of 2026.
Grace was created in 2022 by cofounders Lou Dana, who holds a PhD in pharmacy, business school graduate Quentin Roy and Martin Lenweiter, an engineering and economy graduate with a background in fintech, in the entrepreneurship joint masters’ program offered by HEC Paris and École Polytechnique.
The Paris-based company aims to address a “lack of global reach, seamless integration, and responsiveness required by luxury standards” at a time where luxury thefts are booming.
Incidents such as the 60 percent surge in luxury watch thefts in 2023 from a study by specialized British database The Watch Register are “undermining customer confidence and brand experience,” said Roy, who serves as the French start-up’s chief executive officer.
Backed by a strategic partnership with insurance company Chubb, which specializes in high-net-worth individuals and companies in the luxury space, Grace aims to offer a frictionless and swift experience for consumers.
Protection against theft and loss are automatically activated at purchase and follow the product even when gifted or passed on. Meanwhile, the delay between an incident and resolution is a couple of days, against an average of six to eight weeks for other offers on the market.
Costs for coverage, which can go up to two years at present, are carried by brands.
It may be a sound investment: early tests have shown a double-digit uplift in purchases of items that come with coverage, according to Dana.
Client data acquisition is also enhanced, as protections are tied to the full name and email of the owner of the item. Authenticity is also indirectly reinforced.
Dana said Grace had no plans to move into direct-to-consumer offers or in the secondhand space, unless it is involved in the initial purchase from the brand. Its coverage could also become part of a digital passport ecosystem.
Olga Shikhantsova, a partner at Speedinvest, said Grace had “identified a significant gap in the luxury market and developed an innovative solution to address it.”
Lauding the “creativity, poise and tenacity” of the cofounders, FinTech Collective partner Toby Triebel stated the four-year-old company had the potential to become “a category-defining partner to luxury goods companies.”
“No insurance player has ever succeeded in creating an embedded product for this market with worldwide distribution capabilities and we believe that Grace is on a path to do just this,” he said.
Among the brands who have taken part in Grace’s pilot programs are Paris-based jeweler Copin and leather goods brand Phi 1.618. A rollout is currently underway with a European luxury brand Dana declined to name for now.
