AI Startup Cytora Raises $32.5M to Expand Commercial Insurance Products, Geographies

April 22, 2019

Cytora, the London-based provider of artificial intelligence-powered solutions for the commercial insurance industry, announced it has raised £25 million ($32.5 million) in new financing, which will be used to accelerate expansion of the company’s product suite as well as its entry into new geographies.

The Series B funding round was led by the EQT Ventures fund. Other participants included existing investors Cambridge Innovation Capital, Parkwalk, and a number of angel investors. Existing investors include QBE Ventures and Starr Global Holding, which participated in a 2017 funding round.

“With this investment, we’re looking forward to widening our impact and helping accelerate the insurance industry’s digital transformation,” said Richard Hartley, co-founder and CEO at Cytora. “Today, we’re enabling insurers to underwrite at a fraction of the cost of traditional methods and price policies more accurately. Over the next 24 months, we’re going to scale across the insurance value chain and move into new geographies.”

Cytora was founded and spun out of the University of Cambridge in 2014 by a team of machine learning scientists, data engineers and strategists. The founding team recognized that applying for commercial insurance is an arduous process that can take weeks because of the use of non-transparent pricing and outdated models, said Cytora in a statement.

The team saw an opportunity to apply AI to public and proprietary data, including property construction features, company financials, and local weather – combined with an insurance company’s internal data – to better predict risk and ensure more transparent pricing.

Cytora said its software is being used by some of the world’s largest insurers, including QBE, AXA XL, MS Amlin, and Starr, to inject efficiency and accuracy into their underwriting process. In addition, insurers have built new end-to-end quotation applications on top of Cytora’s APIs (application programming interface), enabling business owners to buy policies online in less than a minute, requiring only a business name and postcode to issue a quote.

“We’re seeing a radical transformation in insurance, with organizations now expecting the same level of simplicity, transparency and convenience from their business insurers as they’re getting from consumer insurers and digital banks,” said Lyle Fong, Partner and investment advisor at EQT Ventures.

Source: Cytora

Related:

Topics InsurTech Commercial Lines Business Insurance Data Driven Artificial Intelligence Funding

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