The inability to accurately assess risks for insurance purposes is very costly to the industry. Earlier this year, State Farm reported that its property and casualty insurance underwriting business suffered a $13 billion hit in 2022 due to “rapidly increasing claims severity and large additions to claims occurring l ‘last year”.
Axle is trying to change that. The two-year-old company has developed a universal API for insurance data and is taking an “Insurance Advocacy” approach, Cameron Duncan, co-founder and CEO of Axle, told TechCrunch.
Many insurtechs solve insurance distribution and policy administration. Instead, Axle, launched by Duncan, Armaan Sikand and Nihar Parikh, provides access to real-time insurance data, automated insurance verification and ongoing coverage monitoring so customers, like car rental companies can reduce their operational costs.
“In the insurance industry today, there is a lot of focus on how we use AI to improve underwriting, but connectivity is where we come in: how do we interact with the rest of the world ?” said Duncan. “Our mission is to bridge the gap between insurance and parallel industries such as auto loans, real estate and mortgages.”
Axle’s products (Image credit: Axle)
Similar to how Plaid operates a user-authorized data platform for banking, Axle allows users to connect their insurance account to trusted companies in seconds via a developer-friendly API or one of Axle’s low-code or no-code options.
After launching a year ago, the company is experiencing double-digit growth in customers and revenue and has expanded its carrier network to more than 100 carriers.
Now Axle has $4 million in seed funding. The round was led by Gradient Ventures and includes investments from existing investor Y Combinator and participation from Soma Capital, Contrary Capital, Rebel Fund, BLH Ventures and a group of angel investors, including team members founder of Plaid and former executives of Cox Automotive. .
The co-founders intend to deploy the new capital in additional hires, expanding its carrier coverage, and adding different markets and use cases. There are two growth angles for Axle, including additional lines of insurance, for example, boat, commercial insurance and healthcare, and going horizontally with use cases around other types of verification and deposit of complaints.
“Securing data is extremely complex,” Sikand said in an interview. “Part of our technology is also to be the first in space to really build a standardized way of understanding and digesting data.”