Today French startup Akur8, an AI-driven insurance pricing solution, has raised €8 million in its Series A round from BlackFin Capital Partners and MTech Capital, bringing its total funding to €10 million.
Akur8, founded in 2018, is an insurtech startup providing AI-powered pricing automation and optimization for insurance carriers. Since its creation, Akur8’s team of actuaries and data scientists has developed a unique cloud-based SaaS platform which is currently used by insurers all over Europe and the US. Its solution 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. The technology is fully compliant with regulatory requirements across the world, and was even featured in the prestigious InsurTech Impact 25 list 2020 compiled by Oxbow Partners.
As insurance companies face increasing competition, pricing sophistication has become a key differentiator. Until now, pricing processes have been 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. This is where Akur8 jumps in – its unique AI algorithm automates 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 and 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.”