Vincent Audoire, CTO & Co-Founder, Feather
Today we're meeting Vincent Audoire, CTO & Co-Founder at Feather. They specialise in providing digital insurance solutions for European expats.
Over to you Vincent - my questions are in bold:
Who are you and what's your background?
I've always had an entrepreneurial streak – I put this down to an early childhood obsession with management games such as SimCity and other tycoon-style titles. And as life progressed, it was rare that I didn't have a side project running. My first co-founding venture was a key exchange solution for holiday rentals, Keydock. More recently, I co-founded Cryptohub – a crypto portfolio tracker.
My story starts in France, where I grew up and earned an engineering degree from the École Supérieure d'Ingénieurs Léonard de Vinci in Paris, specialising in scientific computation. It's fair to say this technical skillset has been pivotal in my ability to address burning problems for modern consumers. It is also what brought me to German fintech N26. I was an early employee, which proved to be a transformational experience: it gave me a front row seat to scaling a FinTech. My role at N26 saw me build the iOS team, and it was during this time that I observed a clear pattern in the market – expats consistently emerged as early adopters of neo-banks. Traditional financial services didn't serve them well: they're complex, opaque, and built for a different era. That insight stayed with me.
I met my co-founder, Rob, at Entrepreneur First in Berlin, a start-up incubator. We connected immediately – driven by shared interests and first-hand frustrations with the insurance industry. In 2016, we built Feather to remove the friction from one of the most frustrating pain points of moving abroad: navigating insurance in a foreign language, with outdated tools, and no transparency.
I remember a former employer asking me "where do you see yourself in four years?", and I replied, "I'd like to start my own company". I did. We did.
What is your job title and what are your general responsibilities?
As Co-Founder and CTO of Feather, I set the vision with Rob, and prioritise keeping us close to the customer, making sure that we're building the right products for them.
So, while my technical background means I focus more on technical aspects of Feather, and Rob on business development, I prioritise maintaining involvement across all aspects of the company, including insurance specifics and customer acquisition. I am a business-first CTO. Other CTOs I've encountered in industry tend to solely focus on technical aspects and can get caught up focusing too much on the shiny new technology that's currently in fashion, whereas I prefer to spend my time focusing on the best technology solution for a given problem. The problem comes first.
It's worth noting that leadership didn't come naturally to me – I had to grow into it. I'd say my approach is quite hands-off. I believe in giving my employees real ownership and responsibility with space to perform. I like to call it 'shock methodology'. This means I don't like to micromanage; I trust that my people can take risks and learn fast, within a blame-free culture that celebrates learning over perfection.
Can you give us an overview of your business?
Feather is the digital insurance platform for expats in Europe. We started in Germany, where systems are hugely bureaucratic, and everything is notoriously offline and overwhelming for newcomers. We've expanded into Spain and France as we're keen to support expats across Europe.
Feather helps expats navigate essential insurance, for example, health, liability, and even pet insurance, with options to add non-essential products such as dental or home insurance, should it suit their lifestyle. By providing English-language support for insurance needs alongside digital onboarding and seamless claims management, we're simplifying the administrative burden for expats.
We operate as an MGA (Managing General Agent), positioned between a broker and an insurance company. This gives us the power to design insurance products with the transient nature of expats in mind and no hidden costs. Instead of year-long sign ups, Feather works with partners to build shorter, more flexible insurance contracts with no upfront costs.
Tell us how you are funded?
Feather is venture-backed. In 2024, Feather announced that we secured €6 million in a funding round led by Keen Venture Partners with Plural and industry leaders from Allianz, AXA, Bastian Kunkel, Mozo, GoCardless, Nested, N26, and Oyster. This brought our total funding to €10 million. Our backers understand both the regulatory complexities and huge opportunity in building trusted financial infrastructure for the modern expat.
What's the origin story? Why did you start the company? To solve what problems?
Feather is the brainchild of me and my co-founder, Rob Schumacher, who I met at Entrepreneur First, in Berlin.
At N26, I observed how quickly expats embraced digital banking solutions, as they often had no other options. And then in 2013, I personally experienced this. Having moved from France to Germany, and after a couple of years in residence, I still didn't have the most basic liability insurance because the process was 100% in German and was complex. There are 100 different public health insurance providers to choose from in Germany, with registration requiring paper forms sent by regular mail.
Rob, despite being half-German, faced identical struggles.
This mutual tussle with the industry revealed a clear market gap: insurance still operates in the dark ages across most of Europe, especially for international newcomers. There are now over 50 million expats living and working in Europe, all in unique situations, requiring different types and levels of coverage. We founded Feather with a clear mission - to bring digital simplicity and English-speaking support to what remains one of Europe's most outdated, paper-heavy industries.
By addressing these pain points directly, we're making essential insurance services accessible to an increasingly mobile European population that, for too long, traditional providers have overlooked.
Who are your target customers? What's your revenue model?
Our customers are expats relocating to Europe, with a core focus on those moving to Germany, Spain, and France. There are three distinct groups we serve: those who need insurance before moving, often for visa requirements, those who need immediate coverage upon arrival, and those who have been in a country for at least three months and want to set up longer-term coverage. Our revenue model is straightforward, we earn a percentage of the premiums we manage. Because we operate as an MGA, we also manage claims up to a certain threshold, which streamlines the user experience.
If you had a magic wand, what one thing would you change in the banking and/or FinTech sector?
I'd wave away legacy compliance processes that are still designed for paper. Many regulatory requirements can be fulfilled digitally, but in some cases, we're still stuck with outdated frameworks that slow down innovation and frustrate users.
What is your message for the larger players in the Financial Services marketplace?
Feather uses a methodology called the 'Wonky Horse' framework, where we're comfortable launching a minimal version of a product quickly and then work on it based on real feedback.
The framework embodies our belief that momentum trumps flawlessness, every time. Rather than pursuing that mythical, perfect product, we deliberately launch minimal, functional versions, which may be awkward and unrefined, to get real user interaction as quickly as possible.
It's a wonky horse, it's not going to be perfect, but it can still get you where you need to go. Some of our earliest releases lacked sophisticated elements and were quite rough around the edges, but they provided something invaluable: genuine customer feedback based on actual usage, rather than hypothetical scenarios.
While at first glance, big players may view this kind of product development as 'small player privilege', there is a switch in mindset they would be so bold to consider. That is: understand your customers, learn from them, and make sure that the solutions you deliver don't overlook those they are intended to serve.
Where do you get your Financial Services/FinTech industry news from?
My reading list changes but lately I've been following the newsletter from Eficiens and L'Argus de l'Assurance. The latter is especially helpful as Feather is launching in France.
Can you list 3 people you rate from the FinTech and/or Financial Services sector that we should be following on LinkedIn, and why?
- Matteo Carbone is great for interesting InsurTech posts.
- Jean-Charles Samuelian-Werve, the co-founder and CEO of Alan, who always has interesting insight on HealthTech and InsurTech.
What FinTech services (and/or apps) do you personally use?
N26 - super simple for mobile banking. Trade Republic - great for stocks and savings. Kraken - a crypto exchange platform.
What's the best new FinTech product or service you've seen recently?
Nothing has really caught my eye recently. I'm prioritising local optimisation and execution. Although, I bank with Revolut and I'm very impressed with the amount of features they've been adding. I'm not entirely convinced by their idea of the "super app" that they want to create, but I do admire their speed of execution.
Finally, let's talk predictions. What trends do you think are going to define the next few years in the FinTech sector?
Tech moves fast. As CTO, I'm constantly scanning for shifts that could redefine our industry's structure or competitive landscape. One area I am keeping an eye on, is Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (MCP), which enables AI agents to integrate directly with applications.
Much to the tune of embedded payments, which has pushed traditional banks to see partnerships and back-end integration, I see large language models (LLMs) doing the same for web services. I see them becoming the front door to industries like insurance. With Insurtech's hooked up to MCPs, users could potentially manage their insurance policies directly through AI assistants like ChatGPT or Claude. It would be a huge shift in how customers engage with digital services.
Thank you very much, Vincent!
Read more about Vincent on LinkedIn and find out more about Feather at feather-insurance.com.