The series of extremely successful startup foundations from alumni of WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management continues through November. With the digital insurance manager "Clark", the 14th startup founded or operated – at least in part – by WHU alumni, has now achieved unicorn status. This year alone, Clark is the fifth startup co-founded by WHU graduates to be valued at more than one billion US dollars before IPO.
Clark was founded in 2015 by Christopher Oster – who earned his doctoral degree at WHU – Steffen Glomb, Marco Adelt, and Chris Lodde. The timing was perfect in recognizing the technical possibilities of digitization. Clark has now acquired Finanzen Group, an internet platform for information on insurance and financial products, from Allianz X. After additional successful financing rounds, the company has reached a market valuation of more than one billion US dollars. Notable investors are White Star Capital, Tencent, and Yabeo, among others.
More than 450,000 customers in Germany and Austria are currently using Clark's free digital service, which allows users to manage their own insurance policies in a clear app. In addition, the insurance manager, which operates independently of individual insurance companies, compares the rates of all providers on the market. Clark also checks the existing contracts of its customers for the respective quality and costs incurred. In the future, Clark hopes to expand into further foreign markets following the acquisition of Finanzen Group.
Analysis by venture capital firm Antler shows that WHU's entrepreneurial ecosystem and the Master in Entrepreneurship program provide an excellent breeding ground for startup founders. Their "unicorn founder roadmap" concludes that the two leading German universities in terms of startups, WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management and the Technical University of Munich (TUM), have fostered more than a quarter of all unicorn founders in the DACH region over the past 20 years. At WHU, there are an average of 1.4 unicorn founders for every 1,000 alumni – undoubtedly an impressive figure. Calculations by TUM support this claim and it is shown in their "Benchmarking the Entrepreneurship Performance of German Universities" study that WHU produces the most startups in Germany relative to student body size. In absolute terms, it still ranks third among all universities despite having significantly fewer students than TUM or Ludwig-Maximilians Universität München (LMU), which hold first and second place respectively.
References
Antler's "Unicorn Founder Roadmap": https://www.antler.co/blog/how-to-build-a-unicorn-in-the-dach-region
"Benchmarking the Entrepreneurship Performance of German Universities" by TUM: https://www.entrepreneurshipranking.com/