Commercial insurance AI firm Cytora raises £25m
Cytora, a provider of artificial intelligence (AI) solutions for the commercial insurance industry, has completed a £25 million Series B funding round led by the EQT Ventures.
“Helping accelerate the insurance industry’s digital transformation”
Other participants include existing investors Cambridge Innovation Capital, Parkwalk and a number of angel investors.
The firm has said that it will use this funding to accelerate the expansion of Cytora’s product suite 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 and data engineers.
The founding team was motivated by the arduous process involved in applying for commercial insurance, which can take weeks. With its non-transparent pricing and use of outdated models, commercial insurance had not been adapted to the needs of modern society.
The team saw an opportunity to apply AI to public and proprietary data, including property construction features, company financials and local weather to better predict risk and ensure more transparent pricing.
“With this investment, we’re looking forward to widening our impact and helping accelerate the insurance industry’s digital transformation,” says 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.”
Hartley adds: “Over the next 24 months, we’re going to scale across the insurance value chain and move into new geographies. The EQT Ventures team brings unrivalled expertise and they’ve supported the growth of some of Europe’s leading businesses.”
Cytora’s software is already being used by insurers like 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, enabling business owners to buy policies online in less than a minute, requiring only a business name and postcode to issue a quote.
