Business Talk Magazine

Alchemy Crew is a venture validation and commercialization lab designed for insurers, reinsurers, and financial services institutions. Alchemy Crew has been known to be relied upon by some of the biggest names in insurance, finance, and adjacent industries, like the property, motor, or energy sectors. Alchemy Crew attempts to aid influential market players to explore and expand into new grounds and exploit opportunities with the most relevant growth ventures. This approach helps Alchemy Crew’s goal, which is to support innovative and disruptive market players unearth new sources of growth by leveraging emerging corporate venturing techniques. 

Alchemy Crew emphasizes helping established partner companies deliver relevant product and service options that align with rapidly changing customer needs and market pace. 

In the turmoil of the pandemic, Alchemy Crew decided to focus its attention on digital-first services, adapting itself to the new reality with strong digital, virtual first and physical presence for their engagement services.

Their business model has developed a flow of work that incorporates both types of market players, young ventures as well as established and mature corporations. This ensures that Alchemy Crew accelerates the speed of transformative venturing activities with their ecosystem of partners.

Options provided include:

• The light R&D option: Alchemy Crew’s partners use this option to augment their ability to expedite their R&D activities by balancing customer, market, and venturing insight to identify the most effective partnership and investment options.
• The core engagement option: Partners also often enlist this option to accelerate their ability to launch new products and services quickly. Alchemy Crew helps leverage validation, experimentation, and commercializing techniques to speed the launch of customer-led offers by identifying ecosystems of ventures rather than building things from scratch.
• The disruptive build option: Alchemy Crew is well aware that not all concepts are equal. It prepares itself to utilize patterns in data accordingly. The Crew constantly discovers ways to lay a solid foundation for using highly disruptive findings that emerge from its sourcing efforts to anticipate disruptive moves and gaps in the market to shape new business concepts and business model ideas.

Crafts and Works of Alchemy

Alchemy Crew has a three-faceted approach to its engagement and business model.

• Insurers and financial services institutions: The main goal is to enable market players to accelerate their internal partnership and corporate venturing activities by considering these as core growth options.
• Startups, scaleups, and grownups: The Crew works with a wide range of ventures able to support the fast execution of major digital initiatives based on external drivers, risk analysis, and deep research.
• Investors: Alchemy also caters to those partners with specific investment priorities and helps guide them to achieve those priorities through partnership and ecosystem-led thinking. Both support their core partners to build a longer-term strategic lens on how best to engage and partner with growth ventures. As Alchemy Crew identifies great candidates for partnership, they also become interesting contenders for investment.

Faith Building through Consistency

Insurance is a knowledge-based industry. It can take 12 to 18 months to finalize a commercial initiative with established incumbent insurance players. The Crew works with 70 years of experience in the industry, enabling them to understand the intricacies of the sector. Through that industry knowledge, years of experience, and solid values and beliefs, the Alchemy Crew team ensures that they continuously focus on delivering clients’ ultimate desired outcomes. 

Core values of the Crew:

• Authenticity: The Crew consists of multicultural and multidisciplinary teams of genuine specialists that think inward and execute onward.
• Integrity: Honesty is a foundation and not a tool—strong moral backbones than wishbones.
• Be always a better version of yourself: Alchemy Crew members thrive on being a better version of themselves for their corporate partners and the ventures they undertake. The Crew pushes the extra mile to take care of their startup, corporate venture partners, and internal teams.

Imaginative Minds pushes Alchemy Ahead of Time

Alchemy Crew puts particular emphasis on R&D as it is their firm belief that to keep up with fast moving uncertainties and define the disruptive markets of tomorrow, they must continuously keep pace of change and emerging future risks. Their research should be practical but futuristic and embed patterns that will affect today’s world and define our immediate tomorrow.

The USP of Alchemy Crew combines several overlapping inherent strengths within their strategy, execution, and the skills they seek to support their vision.

• Expertise: Combining the expertise of a solid internal team and an ecosystem of trusted specialists gives Alchemy Crew a unique perspective into the spheres of insurance, finance, venturing, and investment.

• Sensitivity and Business: Alchemy Crew builds relationships by tailoring its services to the needs of the customer. Alchemy views this mode of functioning as the overall growth of the company itself and the sector itself. Apart from their respective fields, Alchemy constantly tries to make a difference by bringing in new and unexpected collaborators to the arena of insurance, etc.

Alchemy constantly assesses, adjusts and thus redefines the disruptive innovation agenda that it wants to tackle while widening its lens on the opportunities that arise through the blurred lines affecting a multitude of interconnected sectors and therefore contributes to the reinvention of both finance and insurance.

The Crew understands the basics of growth through research and development, so there is a proud atmosphere of evaluating volumes of research papers, primary user surveys and customer journeys that encapsulate the priorities of their core engagement partners to determine the best options and courses of action.

To avoid exhaustion and creative block, Fridays are designated to be taken at one’s own pace wherein the team can work on their innovative interests, which helps improve the company’s lens on a multitude of perspectives.

Conclusion

The first of The Crew: Sabine VanderLinden Leading

The mind behind the idea and execution of Alchemy Crew is Sabine VanderLinden. 

Sabine’s 25 years of experience in insurance, strategy, and innovative thinking gives her the ability to see potential opportunities where most would not. She combines the usage of digital engagement services such as parallel experimentation and open innovation to identify disruptive concepts and business models. Sabine knows this trade thoroughly as she has been the CEO and Founder of Startupbootcamp InsurTech London and Hartford’s InsurTech Hub Accelerator in Connecticut, where she worked across both markets with over 30 corporate insurers and accelerated over 70 growth ventures. The outcome was supporting those 100 Million Dollars in funding, which drove her passion for PE, corporate, and institutional investing. 

Sabine is diverse and ambitious. Both of these qualities make her an entrepreneurial brilliance. All this and her accolades can be credited to her vision and mission behind Alchemy Crew.

Sabine is supported every single day by co-founder and investor Minh Tran an INSEAD graduate and brilliant mind with 30 years of experience in financing. Minh puts his mind around developing what venture capitalist as-a-Service genuinely means in the 21^st century.

Vision: Demystifying and de-risking corporate venturing

Mission: “To guide disruptive intrapreneurial leaders and corporate investors to spearhead profitable returns in a post-pandemic world. To enable our global partners to adapt rapidly to the new normal by fast-solving complex challenges through well-thought-through digital initiatives. To flex and adapt partnership and investment models by applying a combination of acceleration and corporate venturing techniques. To appropriately position our international network of growth ventures to a post-covid-world.” 

Learning:  Learning can only be done through constant research and innovation. Alchemy Crew doesn’t wait for others to come up with solutions but instead paves the road to the future for itself, its core ecosystem partners, and others. This is what sets the learning mentality and the internal mindset of Alchemy Crew aside. It isn’t for reference but to yield well-assessed and planned long-term growth in its most basic form. 

Alchemy in Pandemic

We learn just how strong a company is when it is tested, and Alchemy Crew is one of a kind because it was launched in June of 2020. When covid was spreading rapidly. Alchemy Crew didn’t just thrive. Through the sheer brilliance of a small team supporting Sabine VanderLinden’s vision which combined virtualization and innovative corporate venturing. Still, it offered jobs and aid when they were scarce by solely focusing on keeping their core partners “digitization aware and happy”. Those who trusted the skills, lens, and foresight for years. This laid down the entire enterprise’s overall mindset, which is held atop in the most dignified manner.

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