Paris-based insurtech startup Akur8 seals €8 million Series A to expand AI pricing technology

Akur8, a Paris-based startup behind an AI-driven insurance pricing solution, has raised an €8 million Series A from BlackFin Capital and MTech Capital to expand across Europe and the Americas. Akur8’s algorithm allows insurers to build risk models quickly and get options to market in a matter of hours, which the startup says is over 10 times faster than the traditional manual process. The French insurtech company sees “pricing sophistication” as a key differentiator in today’s insurance market, where real-time analysis, price comparison websites, and low interest rates are changing the game. “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,” said co-founder and CEO Samuel Falmagne. The company claims its solution also provides more transparency and regulatory compliance than standard machine learning approaches to pricing. In a press release, Akur8 says the latter “are by design ‘blackbox’ solutions, meaning the decisions taken by algorithms are difficult to reverse engineer.” Founded in 2018, the startup’s Paris headquarters hosts 25 people, including researchers, designers, data scientists, developers and actuaries. Just this year, the company was named to Oxbow Partners’ InsurTech Impact 25 list.