Rob Schimek is described in the press as an insurance veteran, and the label fits a man who spent his working life inside the industry before starting bolttech. Before 2020 he was chief commercial officer at FWD. One profile notes he trained as an insurance man, not a coder.
That is the quiet irony of the company. Bolttech is called an insurtech, yet its founder came from the insurance side, not the software side. His bet was that insurance was a poor product to buy and a good one to bundle. A person buying a phone, a car loan or a flight will accept a cover if it appears at the right moment, without a form or a call.
Bolttech was founded in 2020 in Singapore with Richard Li as chairman. The idea was to be the pipe: one platform that links insurers on one side with retailers, banks, telecoms and device-makers on the other.
The early backing was large. Reports put the Series A at between US$180 million and US$210 million, and in May 2023 a Series B valued the company at US$1.6 billion. In December 2024 it announced a Series C expected to exceed US$100 million, led by Dragon Fund with Baillie Gifford and Generali. It closed six months later at US$147 million and a US$2.1 billion valuation, with Sumitomo Corporation and Iberis Capital joining existing backers such as Tokio Marine and MetLife.
The numbers it gave are about reach. Annualised quoted premiums were roughly US$65 billion in 2025, up from about US$55 billion in 2023. It counts about 700 distribution partners, over 230 insurers and 6,500 products, with names such as Apple, Allianz, AXA, Progressive and Samsung on its list.
The cost of this scale is that quotes are not sales, and partner and insurer counts have not clearly risen since 2023. The next test is Africa and North America.
For a first-time founder the point is blunt. Schimek did not leave his trade to chase software. He took what he knew about a slow industry, found the place where it was clumsiest, and put a platform there.