Alex Frommeyer is the co-founder and CEO of Beam Dental. Beam Dental is a digital-first dental benefits provider that incorporates dental hygiene behavior into policy pricing, combining an easy-to-use online insurance platform, AI-powered underwriting, and the connected Beam Toothbrush for better overall wellness.

Beam has raised over $160 million in venture capital funding and is the only digital-first company within the $75 billion dental insurance industry. Beam also offers vision insurance, powered by VSP, and group term life coverage for employers of all sizes in partnership with Nationwide Insurance.

Beam is available in 41 states around the U.S. and is accepted at over 400,000 access points nationwide.

Highlights from the show

• Beam is a digitally native dental insurer
• They started in 2012 built around a wellness program delivered through their smart toothbrush
• Beam is built on three idea - Easy, Smart and Preventive
• Easy - What happens when a company is built on a natively, digital chassis? You can rethink every aspect of the product and how it's delivered
• Beyond just being easy, Beam is about being Smart and Preventive
  
  • Smart is about using data to price risk more intelligently and individually, which allows for more customized rates while smoothing out volatility, especially for smaller groups
  • Preventive - a connected toothbrush with subscription replacement brush heads, toothpaste and floss
    
    • Give people credit for taking preventive actions, and Beam has the tools to let people do it and show that they're doing it
• Dental is a smaller product next to very large products (Health) that the industry cares more about, so it wasn't getting attention or investment
  
  • Dental was seen as commoditized and not something that can be improved upon, so why bother
• Where the market saw things as commoditized, the founders at Beam saw opportunity to use data and a connected toothbrush to change things, but the industry wasn't interested
• What's better, ignorance to how hard these problems are to solve, or the incredible depth of knowledge around it?
  
  • Ultimately, it was a huge leg up for Beam not to know much about the industry in creating perseverance to figure things out and not to be talked out of opportunity before even trying at it
• The ubiquity of the toothbrush globally made it much easier to deliver a connected experience that would provide rich data and a way to change behavior
• Despite basically doubling in size every year, they've also been able to lower their loss ratio, which is extremely hard to do and rare in any line of business
  
  • This is validation of Beam's thesis and its ability to price risk and change outcomes

This episode is brought to you by Medallia (Medallia.com), and the book series, "The Future of Insurance: From Disruption to Evolution" by Bryan Falchuk (future-of-insurance.com).

Follow the podcast at future-of-insurance.com/podcast for more details and other episodes.

Music courtesy of UPbeat Music, available to stream on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and Google Play. Just search for "UPbeat Music".