Qatar Insurance Group's Venture Chief: Big VC Money Is the Wrong Fuel for MENA Insurtechs

Corporate venture capital arms at large insurers typically play a passive role -- writing checks into promising insurtechs and letting the ecosystem develop on its own. Lars Gehrmann, Group Chief Digital Officer at Qatar Insurance Group and head of QIC Digital Venture Partners (QIC DVP), built something different, explicitly because he believes the passive model doesn't fit where MENA's insurtech ecosystem actually is. "The whole insurtech ecosystem in the Middle East, or in MENA as such, is really very nascent," he said. "So it's less the role of an incumbent like us to partner and see innovation as our role -- our mandate actually is to help develop this innovation."

Two vehicles, and a deliberately active mandate

QIC DVP operates through two structures: a venture studio that builds companies directly, alone or in partnership, and a corporate VC arm that invests in adjacent insurtech and insurance business models. The studio model is the more unusual choice -- rather than simply funding external founders, QIC identifies opportunities and "puts an idea into those teams and lets them grow together with us," as Gehrmann described it. That's a materially heavier lift than a typical CVC mandate, and Gehrmann is explicit that QIC didn't need to do this out of desperation -- QIC is already one of the largest insurers in the region -- but chose to because it believes someone has to actively build the ecosystem's standards and infrastructure rather than waiting for it to mature organically.

Why big funding rounds can be a disadvantage here

One of Gehrmann's sharper, more counterintuitive points concerns capital itself. Insurtechs entering MENA flush with large international funding rounds, in his experience, often struggle precisely because that capital insulates them from the discipline the region actually demands. "We have seen a couple of insurtechs coming that have been financed with big money," he said, "but this big money does not necessarily help to be frugal and cope with the requirements that we have in the whole region."

The underlying constraint is structural: individual MENA countries are small relative to the US, Europe, or major Asian markets, which means an insurtech has to reach breakeven at comparatively low volumes and typically needs to expand across multiple countries just to reach the scale a single large market would provide elsewhere. A well-funded team that hasn't been forced to build lean, frugal operations from day one, in his account, tends to import cost structures and growth assumptions that simply don't survive contact with MENA's market economics.

A hackathon as ecosystem infrastructure, not a marketing event

QIC DVP's MENA Insurtech Hackathon -- described as the first run by an insurance company in the region -- illustrates the active-builder philosophy in practice. The numbers tell their own story about latent regional interest: 140 companies and teams applied from 39 countries, narrowed to 50 for an online hackathon day, then to 15 semifinalists who went through a 10-day mentorship period, ending with six finalists pitching at QIC's insurtech summit in Doha. The finalist cohort spanned the UAE, Qatar, India, and France, reflecting international as well as regional interest in the programme.

Gehrmann frames the entire funnel less as a talent-scouting exercise for QIC specifically and more as ecosystem infrastructure -- bringing together founders, mentors, and incumbents who wouldn't otherwise be in the same room, with QIC's own involvement being just one output among several the event is designed to produce.

Insurance background is non-negotiable, digital skills are not the differentiator

Asked what QIC DVP actually screens for, Gehrmann's answer echoed standard venture criteria at first -- team quality, market development potential -- but sharpened into something more specific: genuine insurance-sector experience, not general fintech or digital experience. "Without insurance background -- particular insurance, not financial or fintech experience -- I think this is key to be successful in this market, as it's really complicated," he said. Digital capability, in his framing, is something QIC can help a team acquire or hire around; deep familiarity with how insurance actually works regulatorily and operationally is not something that can be bolted on after the fact, and its absence is a more reliable predictor of failure than a weak tech stack.

On where QIC DVP is actively deploying capital, the stated focus areas are QIC's own retail footprint -- travel, health, mobility, and embedded insurance specifically, an area where QIC already operates its own API-based infrastructure and considers itself a serious existing player rather than a newcomer evaluating the category from the outside.

The talent shortage QIC is solving two ways

On staffing its own venture arm, Gehrmann was candid about a genuine regional talent gap: "I found it complicated to get to the same level of talent that I was used to work with in other regions of the world." His response has been deliberately two-pronged rather than a single fix. First, importing experienced people from Asia and Europe specifically to bring international insurtech pattern-recognition into the region. Second, and more structurally interesting, an internal retraining programme at QIC -- identifying existing staff with genuine interest and aptitude, then exposing them directly to new products and projects alongside targeted further education, rather than assuming the necessary skill only exists outside the company. His expectation is that the talent gap itself is self-correcting over time: as more startups launch, more incumbents engage with them, and more regional success stories accumulate, the ecosystem becomes attractive enough to draw talent that currently looks elsewhere.

"No copy-paste will work"

Gehrmann's most pointed structural criticism of the region's insurance market has nothing to do with technology at all. Asked whether startups can simply import models that worked in Europe or the US, his answer was unequivocal: "No copy-paste will not work." The reasons are regulatory fragmentation across individual MENA markets and genuine demographic diversity within each one -- population mixes, cultural context, and political relationships between countries that don't resolve into a single unified "MENA strategy" the way founders sometimes assume.

His sharper observation, though, was about product design rather than regulation: he expressed genuine surprise at how generic most regional insurance propositions still are. "If I look into other regions, we have a certain proposition for a certain group of people. I don't see this here -- everybody is selling the same product to everybody," he said, comparing the region's current state to where more mature markets stood roughly five years earlier. He pointed to a handful of hackathon participants building genuinely segmented, data-driven propositions as evidence the shift is starting, and framed that segmentation gap as one of the clearer, underexploited opportunities in the market today.

Cautious on the metaverse, more interested in decentralized commercial insurance

On web3 and the metaverse specifically, Gehrmann was notably more measured than the hype cycle around the topic at the time. He sees more near-term potential for decentralized structures in commercial insurance -- citing interest in blockchain-adjacent, Lloyd's-syndicate-style models for specialty risk -- than in consumer-facing, metaverse-native insurance products. "I personally believe give it another two, three, or four years to see what will evolve," he said of the metaverse specifically, adding that he doubts the region is currently ready to meaningfully transact insurance inside virtual worlds, even while QIC keeps a deliberate watching brief on the space so it isn't caught flat-footed if that changes.

What this means for the region

Gehrmann's closing framing -- shared explicitly by the hosts -- was a pointed jab at insurtech founders who pitch "disruption": in his view, that language usually signals a founder who doesn't yet understand how genuinely complex the industry is, rather than one who has found a shortcut around it. For GCC insurtech founders and the incumbents evaluating them, the practical takeaways from this conversation are specific rather than aspirational: build for breakeven at low volumes rather than assuming a large funding round buys you time to figure out unit economics later, hire or partner for genuine insurance-domain expertise rather than treating it as a gap digital talent can paper over, and treat any product design that looks identical across customer segments as a red flag rather than a simplification.

This post draws on the FS Brew episode 18: Building an Innovation Ecosystem for Insurance: Lars Gehrmann of QIC Digital Venture Partners.