AI Insurtech company Akur8 announces €8m Series A

  • Insurtech
  • 12.03.2020 09:07 am

AI insurance pricing solution Akur8 has raised €8m in its Series A round from BlackFin Capital Partners and MTech Capital, bringing Akur8’s total funding to €10 million following initial investment and incubation from Kamet Ventures in 2018. Akur8 solves the insurance industry’s issue of ever-increasing pressure to find a sophisticated way to offer quick, easy and appropriate prices for today’s retail and commercial insurance customers. 

Akur8 allows insurers to build risk models more than 10 times faster than the traditional manual process, reducing the pricing time to market to hours rather than weeks. It is currently deployed by multiple insurance companies throughout Europe and The Americas and was named to the prestigious InsurTech Impact 25 list for 2020 compiled by Oxbow Partners. 

Pricing sophistication has become a key differentiator as insurance companies face increasing pressure on pricing and time-to-market, driven by new competition (direct players with real-time reactivity), price comparison websites, and low interest rates that undermine profitability. Yet pricing processes remain lengthy, manual and inefficient. While AI has the potential to improve this process, standard machine learning approaches are by design ‘blackbox’ solutions, meaning the decisions taken by algorithms are extremely hard to reverse engineer. Akur8 has created a solution to this challenge by developing a unique AI algorithm to automate the insurance pricing process while providing complete transparency, thereby ensuring compliance with local insurance regulatory requirements.

Akur8 is headquartered in Paris with a team of 25 people including a large research & design team, data scientists, developers and actuaries. The latest funding will be used to accelerate its international expansion throughout Europe and the US.  

Samuel Falmagne, Co-Founder and CEO of Akur8, said: “When we embarked on building Akur8, we were passionate about offering a truly novel solution for the insurance industry. We are proud to have developed a product that gives carriers the ability to meet customers’ expectations for real time pricing while improving the accuracy of their risk assessment, thus significantly reducing their loss ratio. We are looking forward to continuing our growth journey and are excited to have the support of BlackFin and MTech, two leading investors in our space.”

Julien Creuzé, Managing Director at BlackFin Capital Partners, said: “Akur8 has developed a highly differentiated AI-based solution for risk modelling and pricing, with tremendous value potential for the insurers who embrace it. It is a must-have product for insurers looking to stay relevant in an increasingly competitive and complex environment. We firmly believe in the team and are proud to be their partners in this round.”

Kevin McLoughlin, Partner and Co-founder of MTech Capital, said: “Our investment thesis is centred around backing visionary founders with the ambition to transform insurance through the use of technology. We are proud to be backing Akur8 as a unique player solving a critical issue for the entire industry.”

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