The Heart Behind the Innovation: Jihan Abass’s Mission to Empower Communities Through Digital Insurance

Early Life and Education of Jihan Abass

Jihan Abass is a Kenyan entrepreneur and businesswoman who is the founder and CEO of Lami Insurance Technology, an insurance technology company based in Nairobi, Kenya and Lami Direct Insurance, a digital vehicle insurance company. She was born and raised in Mombasa, Kenya a coastal city that gave her a unique perspective on global finance and local needs. Coming from a well-off family, she was struck by a confession from a waiter during a holiday home from London who revealed she did not have insurance coverage, sparking Jihan’s awareness of the vast insurance gap in Africa. Abass pursued her higher education in London, earning a bachelor’s degree in Investment and Financial Risk Management from Bayes Business School (formerly Cass Business School), City, University of London in 2015 . She later obtained an MBA from the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School in 2019, supported by the Saïd Business School Foundation Scholarship. She chose Oxford specifically for its focus on social impact, which aligned with her mission to democratize insurance access across Africa.

From Sugar Trading to Insurance Innovation

Before becoming an entrepreneur, Abass worked as a commodity futures trader and sugar trader at Toyota Tsusho Sugar Trading Limited in London, where she traded on the New York and London sugar markets. This experience in high-pressure financial markets taught her risk management skills that would prove vital for her future insurance ventures. The pivotal moment came during a holiday to Kenya when she spoke with a waiter who lacked any insurance coverage. When she investigated further, she discovered that formal insurance coverage penetration in Africa was as low as 3% a shocking statistic that revealed a massive market failure. She learned that in Kenya alone, there were over 50 insurance companies but penetration levels were only 2.4%. This discovery prompted her to leave her lucrative trading career and return to Kenya to solve this problem.

Griffin Insurance: Kenya’s First Digital-Only Car Insurance

Jihan Abass in 2016, founded Griffin Motor Assurance (also known as Griffin Insurance), Kenya’s first digital-only car insurance platform. The platform allowed people to buy insurance in less than two minutes a revolutionary improvement over the traditional process that took about two days to get a quote. The Griffin app offered unprecedented flexibility: users could pause their insurance if traveling, upgrade or downgrade coverage whenever they wanted, and access emergency services embedded in the app. Griffin could process claims in seven days compared to the industry average of 60 to 90 days, and offered additional services including garage networks and glass coverage. The app was designed to be a “one-stop-shop” for everything car owners needed. This consumer-facing product served as both a solution to the insurance gap and a proof-of-concept for the technology platform that would become Lami.

Lami Technologies: Insurance-as-a-Service Platform

Building on the success of Griffin, Jihan Abass founded Lami Technologies in 2018 to address the fundamental infrastructure problem in African insurance. Lami is an insurance-as-a-service platform and API that enables businesses including banks, tech companies, e-commerce platforms, and other entities to quickly and seamlessly offer digital insurance products to their customers. The platform’s core innovation is its flexible insurance rating engine and direct integration with underwriters, allowing businesses to co-create tailored insurance products. Unlike traditional insurance models with rigid 18-month product development cycles, Lami can go from product creation to launch in about a month. The platform accommodates the entire insurance value chain, making the process of purchasing any kind of insurance product seamless. Lami’s B2B2C approach leverages the trust and relationships that existing digital platforms have built with their customers, allowing them to offer insurance as a complement to their existing services. This embedded insurance model is particularly powerful in African markets where trust in financial institutions is low but mobile penetration is high.

Funding and Growth Milestones

Abass has secured significant venture capital for Lami, making her one of Africa’s most notable female tech founders:

• May 2021: $1.8 million seed round — Led by Accion Venture Lab with participation from AAIC, Consonance, P1 Ventures, Acuity Ventures, The Continent Venture Partners, and Future Africa. At the time, Lami had sold more than 5,000 insurance policies
• August 2022: $3.7 million seed extension — Led by Harlem Capital, an early-stage venture firm focused on minority and women founders, with participation from Newtown Partners, Peter Bruce-Clark of Social Impact Capital, Caribou Honig and Jay Weintraub of InsureTech Connect, and senior members from Exotix Advisory. This brought total funding to $5.5 million. By August 2022, Lami had grown its portfolio to 85,000 policies and quadrupled premiums underwritten to $800,000, with projections to exceed $2 million that year. The company expanded to Nigeria, Egypt, Malawi, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) following the acquisition of Bluewave Insurance Agency

Strategic Partnerships and Ecosystem Building

Lami has integrated with over 25 active underwriters including Britam, Pioneer, and Madison Insurance, distributing more than 30 products ranging from motor and medical to employee benefits and device insurance. Key partnerships include:

• Stanbic Bank — Uses Lami’s SaaS platform to power bancassurance products
• Jumia — Powers insurance marketplace on JumiaPay app
• Sendy — Per-trip insurance policy for transporters in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania
• Kwara — Makes insurance accessible to over 60,000 SACCO (credit union) members
• Lipa Later — Insurance against payment default for financed products
• MarketForce — Retail B2B and distribution platform integration

Jihan Abass has also focused on empowering traditional insurance agents through technology. Lami’s platform enables 1,000 agents to process 10,000+ policies monthly, with 850 active agents each month. The hybrid model reduces paperwork by 89% while maintaining the human relationships crucial for trust in African markets.

Breaking Barriers as a Female Founder

As a young, Black woman in Kenya’s tech industry which is dominated by men and expatriates Abass faced significant challenges. “In the beginning people thought what I was trying to do was kind of crazy. They thought the problem was too big to solve,” she recalled. However, she learned that “traction speaks for itself: if you are able to show progress and show results, then people start to get on board” . Jihan Abass success is particularly notable given the funding disparities for female founders in Africa. According to a World Bank report, only 3% of early-stage funding since 2013 went to all-female founding teams, compared to 76% for all-male teams . Jihan Abass has been vocal about these challenges: “I think it’s tough in the tech ecosystem particularly being an African, a Black woman, because for example it’s not as easy to raise funds… But you can’t really say that’s the problem until you’ve overcome it, then you can point it out. That’s…my aim”

Recognition and Awards

Jihan Abass has received numerous accolades for her entrepreneurial achievements:

• Quartz Africa Innovator (2021) — Named among female innovators leading the way
• InsureTech Connect 2020 Representative for Africa — Selected to represent the continent at the world’s largest insurtech event
• Business Daily Top 40 Under 40 — Recognized among Kenya’s most influential young leaders
• Business Insider Africa Awards Nominee (2022) — Nominated for Internet Entrepreneur of the Year
• Lioness of Africa Cover Story (2022) — Featured as a leading African businesswoman
• Al Jazeera Africa Direct Documentary (2022) — Subject of documentary “Jihan’s Venture: A Businesswoman in Kenya”

A particularly memorable highlight was being invited to meet the Prime Minister of Barbados as one of three startups selected by the Central Bank of Kenya to showcase their work

Vision and Philosophy

Abass’s core mission is to “provide a safety net for people” across Africa. She recognizes that many Africans rely on single sources of income without protecting them through financial services like insurance. Her approach combines deep local understanding with global execution, leveraging technology to bridge the $68 billion insurance gap in Africa. She advocates for “democratizing access to insurance by creating the infrastructure to facilitate others to be able to create and distribute products”. Her advice to fellow entrepreneurs: “Do you have a problem worth solving and are you willing to sacrifice time and put in a lot of effort to actually solve that problem?… The first step is always to try: get out there and do it. There’s never the perfect time or opportunity… I don’t think there’s such a thing as the right time or the right choice, I think it’s about the drive and the will to succeed”

Current Role and Future Plans

As of 2022, Jihan Abass appointed her CFO Roy Perlot who had been with Lami since 2020 as co-founder. She continues to lead Lami’s expansion across Africa, with plans to reach 50 million customers by 2025 and underwrite over $1 billion in gross written premiums. The company is exploring innovative product lines including travel insurance for daily bus rides, nano-policies priced at one Kenyan Shilling per trip, and weather-indexed products for rural farmers. Jihan Abass envisions that all insurance will eventually go digital within the next three to five years, and Lami is positioning itself to be the infrastructure layer enabling that transformation across the continent