Alexander Kent-Braham co-founded Marshmallow with his identical twin Oliver and the software engineer David Goate. Both brothers were born in south-west London and are co-CEOs.
The idea came from a Canadian friend who had just moved to the UK and kept getting very expensive car insurance quotes. The twins saw that better data could let them insure people with thin UK histories and low credit scores.
The company was incorporated in 2016 as Twin Thinking and became Marshmallow in 2017. For the first 10 months the team worked from the lobby of a Virgin Active gym on a £80 membership. They won a 2018 naming dispute with Marsh McLennan.
A $1.2m seed round came in 2018 from Investec and Passion Capital. An $85m Series B in 2021 valued the company at $1.25bn. The Financial Times ranked it second in Europe's fastest-growing companies in 2023, with 660% annual growth. A 2025 raise of about $90m valued it at about $2bn.