How SafetyWing Grew to $24M Revenue Selling a Social Safety Net for Digital Nomads
Sondre Rasch helped build Norway's social safety net, then noticed the internet's labor market didn't have one. By April 2023 SafetyWing was at a $24M run rate, doubling yearly — and Rasch disclosed his Series B valuation on the tape for the first time anywhere.
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Most SaaS founders find their idea in a spreadsheet or a standup. Sondre Rasch found his writing policy for the government of Norway, working on the actual social safety net. The observation that became SafetyWing arrived at his first startup, the freelance-design platform Superside, in 2016: “The internet labor market is global, goes across borders — but all the infrastructure that supports the labor market works as if it’s local… If you’re hiring a freelancer from Guatemala, they will not qualify for your social safety net.”
Someone should rebuild the welfare state, globally, as a subscription. Rasch’s characteristically Norwegian conclusion is the entire company — everything else is sequencing.
By the time he sat down with Nathan in April 2023, that idea was a company doing a $24 million run rate — with a Series B valuation Rasch disclosed on the tape for the first time anywhere.
Start with one piece of the net
The founding plan was explicitly modular: “Let’s make something like the Norwegian social safety net, available on the internet as a membership — but we have to start somewhere. One little piece, then build out health, retirement, disability, until we make a membership at the end.” Users voted health first. For a wedge market, Rasch picked the segment he belonged to: digital nomads — “the influencer segment of remote work.”
Nomad Insurance launched in 2018 (after a 2017 tinkering year and a YC batch), priced at $35 a month, direct to travelers from the website — $45 by 2023, “inflation adjustments.” It passed $1M in revenue in about a year. The product Rasch had originally wanted — coverage his own old company could buy for its team — took until 2020, when Remote Health launched after the request arrived organically “a hundred times” from companies wanting to cover global teams. Superside finally became a customer then, four years after inspiring the idea.
The COVID roller coaster, in one paragraph
For a travel-insurance business, 2020 was both catastrophe and catalyst, and Rasch narrated it without varnish: “First it was very bad — a third of our customers evacuated and we lost them. A huge drop… existential crisis. Then come August 2020 we had this massive growth — 3x in five months — due to introducing COVID coverage. And then it was great again.” The lasting effect was structural: COVID “accelerated the advent of remote work by five years,” and SafetyWing sells the infrastructure remote work is missing.
The unit math at $24M
Nathan ran the arithmetic on air: 25,000 policies at $45 a month is about $1.1M monthly. Rasch’s correction revealed the real engine — the blended number was twice that, roughly $2M a month. Two products, one funnel:
Nomad Insurance, sold direct from the website — the side Nathan’s on-air math captured.
A slice of policyholders are companies on the higher-priced Remote Health team plan — the side that doubles the blend.
Growth channels stayed scrappy — an ambassador program, a platform API, and a small sales motion — while the roadmap pointed at the original vision: a SafetyWing payment card for point-of-care claims, then retirement and disability, the membership assembled one module at a time.
The claims experience drew Nathan’s skepticism — who actually uploads receipts for reimbursement? Rasch’s answer was the honest insurance answer: nobody buys the product for the $50 doctor visit. “Sometimes you have that thing that costs $2,000, or $20,000, or maybe you need to be evacuated to another hospital. It’s the serious things.” He also dropped the industry aside that explains half of American healthcare anxiety: US medical networks charge prices that make up the majority of a US policy’s cost — internationally, the same coverage is structurally cheap. SafetyWing’s arbitrage is partly just geography.
The funding ladder
“I might as well say it” — the $195M disclosure
SafetyWing raised $53M in total, the last round closed into “a plungy environment,” in Rasch’s coinage, with investors already canceling meetings as the market fell:
- 2018 · Y Combinator The batch; Nomad Insurance launches the same year at $35 a month.
- 2019 · Seed $3.5M.
- 2020 · Series A $8M — the year Remote Health ships.
- Apr 2022 · Series B $35M.
Asked about terms, he paused and gave Nathan the exclusive: “I might as well say it. The post-money valuation was one ninety-five. I don’t think I’ve said that anywhere else.” At the $12M run rate of the raise, that’s a 16.2x multiple — “within normal,” as he put it, in a year when someone had told him “it’s 100x now” months earlier. Doubling into the valuation instead of raising into one: the un-plungy strategy.
$195MSeries B post-money — disclosed on the April 2023 tape for the first time anywhere
Since the tape
The GetLatka dataset’s follow-on rows show the compounding continued: revenue around $34M (estimated) by October 2024, with headcount jumping from 60 at the interview — 20 of them engineers — to about 145 by March 2024 as the company scaled into the Remote Health opportunity. Current figures live on SafetyWing’s GetLatka profile; the full April 2023 conversation is here. For the pricing mechanics of subscription businesses like this one, see our ACV breakdown.
Rasch’s closing answer — what he wishes he’d known at 20 — doubles as the company’s founding logic, a policy advisor who eventually stopped advising and built the thing: “To go straight for the thing I most wanted, instead of doing a learning path.”
SourcesNathan’s April 2023 interview with Sondre Rasch; GetLatka dataset follow-on rows through October 2024.
