Akur8, an AI insurance pricing solution, has netted €8m in its Series A round to support its expansion efforts across the US and Europe.
The capital injection was supplied by Blackfin Capital Partners and MTech Capital. The Series A round puts Akur8’s total funding to €10m after it closed an initial investment and incubation from Kamet Ventures in 2018.
Headquartered in Paris, the InsurTech aims to solve the insurance industry’s rising pressure to find quick, easy and appropriate prices for retail and commercial insurance customers.
Its software empowers insurers to create risk models which are over ten times faster than manual processes, reducing the pricing time to market to hours rather than weeks. Insurance firms across Europe and the Americas are already leveraging Akur8.
Akur8 co-founder and CEO Samuel Falmagne 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.”
The company claims pricing sophistication is one of the key differentiators for insurance companies. This is due to pressures on pricing and time-to-market caused by increased competition, price comparison websites and low interest rates. AI can improve pricing processes but many of the standard solutions are designed as ‘blackbox’ solutions, making them hard to reverse engineer, Akur8 said.
The Akur8 platform solves this by leveraging AI technology to automate and optimize the pricing processes at insurance firms, while boosting transparency.
BlackFin Capital Partners managing director Julien Creuzé 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.”
Copyright © 2020 FinTech Global
