Axle, the AI-native clearinghouse for insurance, has raised $17.5m in Series A funding, led by Base10 Partners, as it looks to expand the number of insurance workflows it automates for carriers and businesses across the real economy.
The round included continued backing from Y Combinator and Gradient, alongside participation from Stage 2 Capital, industry angels including the founders of Cover Genius, and existing investors from the early team at Plaid.
Over the past six months, Axle has tripled the number of workflows it automates and now clears more than $100bn in coverage annually for over 4,000 customers, including auto dealers, rental car companies, mortgage lenders, auto lenders and employers. Its client roster includes several Fortune 500 names, such as Rocket Mortgage, Avis, Experian and Sonic Automotive. The company says it has sped up these workflows by 20 times while helping customers recover hundreds of millions of dollars in losses.
Insurance underpins an $8.3 trillion segment of the economy, required for purchases ranging from cars to mortgages to rental vehicles and apartment leases, yet much of the sector still relies on outdated methods such as fax machines and phone calls to verify and monitor policies.
A mortgage lender, for instance, may need to check in on a single loan’s insurance status more than ten times a year. This inefficiency stems from a structural gap: unlike banking or credit, insurance lacks a shared ledger, meaning a single large carrier might operate 15 or more separate policy systems, with data often trapped in unstructured documents designed for brokers rather than software.
Axle addresses this by integrating its infrastructure and AI agents into these fragmented systems, directing requests to the correct platform and converting unstructured data into a standardised format. The result is a single API that allows software and AI agents to automate core insurance questions, such as confirming whether a customer holds valid cover, whether it meets requirements, and whether updates are needed.
With the new capital, Axle plans to grow its engineering and go-to-market teams, broadening its clearinghouse to cover more than 50 segments across home, auto, renters, commercial and specialty insurance. The company also intends to build closer ties with carriers, which are increasingly adopting Axle as a governed gateway into their systems, having already validated its approach across five distinct markets.
Axle was founded by Cameron Duncan, Armaan Sikand and Nihar Parikh, who have been friends for 15 years. The trio encountered the challenges of fragmented insurance systems directly while developing products for automotive manufacturers, rental car companies and mortgage lenders during their time at Deloitte Digital and Cox Automotive.
Axle co-founders Cameron Duncan, Armaan Sikand and Nihar Parikh said, “Everything the economy runs on – credit, payments, identity, income – has a clearinghouse in the middle. Insurance never has. We’re building it. Once insurance is standardized and programmable, it becomes far more valuable to the carriers who write it, the businesses that rely on it, and the hundreds of millions of consumers it protects.”
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