French insurtech Akur8 is revolutionising insurance pricing with transparent AI. In a recent development, the company secured $30 million (nearly £21.4 million) in a Series B funding round from BlackFin Capital Partners and MTech Capital.
The investment round was closed less than two years after the P&C and health insurance pricing SaaS solution provider first commercialised its platform. It follows the Series A funding round raised by the company 15 months back from the same investors.
Growth plans in the UK
Notably, Akur8 operates in the UK and has offices in London. With this investment, it will focus on growing its presence in the country. Samuel Falmagne, co-founder and CEO of Akur8 said, “The fundraise will definitely contribute to the growth of our UK operations. We have a number of new hires in the pipeline to join our UK office and serve the UK market locally. It is a strategic market for us, especially sophisticated as far as insurance pricing is concerned with many regulatory changes under way that could impact insurance carriers’ pricing strategies, such as the price walking ban. We already have a number of clients in the UK and plan to expand our client base significantly.”
International expansion plans
The investment will help Akur8 accelerate its international expansion with a particular emphasis on furthering its US footprint as the largest insurance market in the world. Also, it will establish a presence in APAC in 2022. The funding round will also be used to accelerate its product development pipeline to cover the full pricing suite, develop US-tailored features and create more value-added features to enhance existing modules.
Falmagne further commented, “We are happy to announce the closing of our Series B funding round and are grateful for the support we have seen from our investors. This latest milestone will enable us to accelerate the transformation of insurance pricing even further, fuel our international expansion in the US and APAC, and equip P&C and health carriers with a state-of-the-art, integrated pricing solution that we have been building and refining tirelessly.”
Guillaume Beraud-Sudreau, co-founder and Chief Actuary at Akur8 added: “We are humbled by the trust that our clients and investors have placed in Akur8. Building the future of insurance pricing powered by Transparent AI has been our goal since the first day of R&D. Now this vision has become reality and we can’t wait to accelerate our growth to become the global reference in insurance pricing.”
Julien Creuzé, Partner at BlackFin Capital Partners stated: “The BlackFin team is thrilled to see Akur8 continue to spread its wings and deploy its next generation pricing platform across insurance carriers worldwide. We have built a great relationship with the Akur8 management team and it’s a pleasure to welcome new investors and continue this journey with them.”
Transparent AI transforms insurance pricing
Founded in 2018 by Guillaume Beraud-Sudreau, Samuel Falmagne, Paris-based Akur8 works with the vision to transform insurance pricing with its Transparent AI, to empower actuaries and pricing teams to make faster and better decisions. The cloud-based solution automates the generation of pricing models.
The company does this by combining the speed and performance of Machine Learning with absolute transparency. Akur8 enables higher speed-to-accuracy and significantly accelerates the pricing time to market while providing insurers with a highly robust and secure pricing process.
Eventually, Akur8 has acquired more than 30 customers across 10 countries, including global leaders AXA, Generali and Munich Re, specialty insurers Canopius and Tokio Marine Kiln, insurtechs Wakam and wefox, as well as mutualistic player Matmut. The Akur8 platform is used by 350 users within insurers’ pricing teams every day, to compute their pricing models across P&C, personal and commercial lines, and health. Its client footprint spans across a dozen countries in Europe, Asia and America.
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