Some of the most valuable consumer opportunities sit in categories that are economically important but where the incumbents are unloved — products millions of people depend on, buy grudgingly, and hope never to use. Most founders avoid these spaces. The incumbents look entrenched, the regulation is complicated, and customers have learned to expect very little. But a few founders look at those same categories and see the opportunity. Customers who expect very little are quick to notice a product that is dramatically better, and quick to tell other people about it. Delivering that product changes what people believe the category can be.
Travel insurance is exactly this kind of category. Travel is one of the world’s largest industries and an increasingly important part of how people spend their time and money, yet even as travel becomes more common, it is becoming less reliable. Trips are more expensive, disruptions are increasingly frequent, and the consequences when something goes wrong can be significant. This spring, the first major U.S. airline collapse in a generation stranded tens of thousands of travelers each day. There has been enormous innovation in how people discover, plan, and book travel, but the products designed to protect travelers after they book have not kept pace: insurance remains difficult to understand, cumbersome to buy, and a claim often means a 30- to 45-day reimbursement process disconnected from the problem a traveler is trying to solve in the moment.
Faye has built a fundamentally better product for this category and is reimagining how traveler care should be delivered. That is why we are thrilled to announce that Madrona is leading Faye‘s Series C and partnering with Elad Schaffer, Daniel Green, Motti Bebchuk, and the entire Faye team. As part of the investment, Chris has joined Faye’s board.
A Better Product in a Broken Category
Faye is building the leading autonomous platform for traveler care, starting with whole-trip travel insurance. A single policy covers medical emergencies, trip cancellation and interruption, baggage, and delays, and can be purchased in less than a minute through Faye’s mobile app.
The Faye app delivers a seamless and magical experience throughout the trip, but the value of Faye’s approach becomes clearest when something goes wrong. Rather than making customers wait weeks to be reimbursed, Faye pays approved claims into a digital wallet that can be used immediately. In many cases, claims related to delays or lost baggage are paid automatically. The app also tracks trips in real time, allowing Faye to identify disruptions and help customers before they even know they need to reach out. It is truly like having a proactive travel assistant there to always support you when anything goes wrong.
Travelers love the experience. Faye has now served hundreds of thousands of customers, most of whom actively use the app, an extraordinary level of engagement for an insurance product. The company has taken a category that consumers historically only tolerated and built a product they actively love.
We believe Faye has created the best product in travel insurance today. But more importantly, it has established the foundation to do far more for travelers over time.
The Infrastructure Behind the Experience
What makes the magical experience possible is everything Faye has built underneath it.
Faye has delegated underwriting authority from A+-rated carriers, allowing the company to design products, set prices, select risk, and administer claims directly. Its internal technology platform powers underwriting, claims, customer service, and other core operations.
Faye is also using AI throughout the platform to monitor customers’ trips proactively, understand when something has gone wrong, and provide the right solution, often without the traveler even having to ask. The result is a product that feels dramatically more responsive than traditional insurance because the underlying operation has been maniacally rebuilt around the customer.
Building this infrastructure required years of work, deep technological innovation across the stack, and hundreds of licenses across all 50 states. It is difficult to build, difficult to replicate, and central to both the quality of Faye’s product and the strength of its business.
It also required an exceptional team capable of bringing together insurance, technology, operations, and consumer product design in a way very few companies have managed to do.
Starting With Insurance
Travel insurance is the entry point, but the larger opportunity extends across the rest of the trip.
Once Faye is protecting a trip, tracking it in real time, and moving money on behalf of the traveler, it is uniquely positioned to provide other services that are currently fragmented across multiple products. Faye already offers international payments, eSIM connectivity, lounge access, trip budgeting, and other financial and logistical services.
By bringing these services together, Faye earns the right to build a much broader relationship with the traveler. Instead of relying on a collection of disconnected products, customers increasingly turn to Faye as their one place to protect, manage, and get more out of a trip.
That is the larger vision: to become the product travelers turn to after they book. We believe Faye is better positioned than any company we have seen to build that platform, and the opportunity in front of it is enormous.
The Team
Elad and Daniel are building their second company together, and that experience is evident in how Faye operates.
We have spent much of the past year getting to know the company closely. The team has a bold view of what Faye can become, and couples that with the operational discipline required to make that vision real. The company is executing with a level of focus, speed, and consistency that stands out at this stage.
They have also built a team with the insurance expertise, product instincts, and operating depth required to win in a complicated category. Faye is ambitious about the future, but equally rigorous about the details required to get there.
Why Madrona, Why Now
At Madrona, we have spent decades working across the intersection of software, consumer products, and travel. Before Madrona, Steve founded and led Concur and has continued to invest throughout the travel ecosystem.
We have seen relatively few teams combine consumer product excellence with the operating depth and industry knowledge required to succeed in this category. Faye is one of those rare companies.
The business has reached an important moment. The product is working, customers and partners clearly love it, and Faye has built the infrastructure required to scale. At the same time, the company is still in the early stages of pursuing a much larger opportunity across the full traveler journey.
We could not be more excited to back Elad, Daniel, Motti, and the entire Faye team as they build the future of traveler care.
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