Louise Birritteri (pictured) didn’t set out to disrupt the insurance industry, but she saw a problem no-one was solving. That gap, in home insurance for short-term lets, led her to launch Pikl. Today, she balances executive and advocacy roles across the insurtech sector, including chairing Insurtech UK.
The idea for Pikl emerged when Birritteri stayed in an Airbnb during a work trip. “We realised homeowners had no suitable insurance when they listed on platforms like Airbnb,” she said. “There simply wasn’t a product.” That gap led to the creation of a specialist MGA focused on the sharing economy, launched in 2019 after a pilot the year before.
Birritteri credits cross-industry expertise as a frequent source of innovation. “The most interesting insurtechs I’m seeing now are using AI, health tech, climate tech, and many are led by people who aren’t from insurance,” she said. “They bring domain expertise from other industries and apply it to insurance problems. That’s where the innovation comes from.”
Whether it's satellite data for wildfire risk or AI tools for healthcare underwriting, she sees diverse perspectives, not just demographic but professional, as key to future growth. “Diversity brings new ways of thinking. If you want fresh ideas, you need founders with different backgrounds.”
Despite growing attention on gender equity, Birritteri points to a persistent funding imbalance. “I heard recently at the Treasury that only 1.8% of venture funding goes to all-female founding teams,” she said. “With such little investment going to women, many female founders I have met who are pregnant or raising kids, are scared this will make it even harder for them to get investment.”
At Pikl, she has implemented policies to support equal access. “We’ve mirrored Aviva’s equal parental leave policy, because equality means men take the same time out as women,” she said. “We also hire returning mums in part-time roles. They’re incredibly skilled and want flexibility – it’s a win-win.”
But she believes policy change is needed more broadly. “It’s like the FTSE 100 a decade ago, quotas helped shift the dial,” she said. “Maybe it’s time we do the same with funding. Because it’s not that there aren’t enough female founders, it’s that the money isn’t flowing fairly.”
The early insurtech narrative often focused on disruption and disintermediation. Birritteri sees the reality as more collaborative. “There’s less talk about disruption now, it’s about partnership,” she said. “Insurance is capital-intensive and heavily regulated. If you’re a startup, you need partners to scale.”
She is among several industry leaders advocating for simplified pilot frameworks and faster onboarding processes. “Some big insurers say they want to help startups, but they hand you a 300-page onboarding document,” she said. “That doesn’t work when you’re small. You need leaner processes and trusted intermediaries to get things moving.”
Birritteri believes that matching the agility of startups with the infrastructure of incumbents remains essential. “They're a bit like big cruise liners and trying to get them to turn short notice or win is just not going to happen, really,” she said. “So I think there's a really nice symbiotic relationship there and we're seeing more and more collaboration happen.”
Looking ahead, she sees three forces shaping the next five years: regulation, economic constraint, and AI. “We’ve had so much regulatory change in the UK, and while it’s well-intentioned, it adds cost,” she said. “At some point we have to ask if all of it’s creating real consumer value.”
According to Birritteri, periods of economic pressure often spur innovation. “Some of our best products came out of COVID. Airbnb launched after the 2008 crash. Pressure creates innovation,” she said. “And AI is going to multiply that pressure. Efficiency, automation, new risk models – it’s all coming.”
She also raises concerns about how AI may reshape the talent pipeline. “If junior roles are replaced by automation, how do people learn the ropes?” she asked. “We’ll need new ways to train the next generation of insurance leaders.”
From product development to talent strategy, Birritteri argues that the future of insurtech depends on reducing structural friction. That includes simplifying insurer-startup relationships, widening access to capital, and increasing representation at the leadership level.
“There are incredible ideas out there, but they won’t scale if the systems don’t support them,” she said. “If we get the funding right, the partnerships right, and the people right, that’s when this market really takes off.”
