Following Akur8’s $120M Series C funding round, led by One Peak, we sat down with CEO & Co-founder Samuel Falmagne and Chief Client Officer & Co-founder Brune de Linares to learn more about what’s next for the InsurTech leader.

Akur8’s mission is to revolutionize insurance pricing and reserving by leveraging transparent AI to empower insurers with faster, more accurate, and fully integrated actuarial solutions that drive business value, enhance decision-making, and deliver exceptional customer outcomes on a global scale. This interview highlights Akur8’s founding story, market potential, and innovation edge.

Watch the video recording here or read the conversation transcript below (edited for clarity).

Samuel Falmagne, CEO & Co-founder, Akur8 and Brune de Linares, Chief Client Officer & Co-founder, Akur8

Akur8’s founding story

Samuel Falmagne, CEO & Co-founder – Brune and I had quite a long career in tech companies – IBM, Google, and other InsurTechs – and we always wanted to start something by ourselves. We got to know some people – technical people, data scientists, actuaries – that were working in an insurance company on the specific use case of the application of machine learning and AI toward actuarial processes, especially pricing. We thought it would be a great opportunity to start a company. We saw all the benefits that AI could bring to actuarial processes that are heavily manual, and that's basically how we started the company.

The market opportunity

Brune de Linares, Chief Client Officer & Co-founder – I think that from the beginning, we've seen that there was a global market, meaning that we could address with one platform and one solution any insurance market or any insurance company across the globe.

And so, we decided to invest from the beginning in building a global company with different nationalities and being able to support any customers in any language. It was really in Akur8’s DNA to address the global market.

Samuel Falmagne, CEO & Co-founder – And we have clients in more than 40 different countries across the globe, so we've become very international quite fast.

The role of transparent AI

Samuel Falmagne, CEO & Co-founder – Unlike a generic AI platform, from the beginning, we recognized that for this specific use case to bring business value, we needed specific algorithms. And the reason is the following...as you know, the insurance industry is heavily regulated. There is also a high risk of adverse selection, so you need to have a very high level of transparency and control, and none of the black box effects of AI are acceptable for the insurance industry.

So that was really the challenge. It was to make sure that we keep full transparency and control while using machine learning. This is how we started the company, and this is what makes us different, still today, is this capability to have applied AI on a very specific vertical use case that takes into account the requirements of this use case, which is insurance pricing. 

I think this is really key to bring business value on vertical – to make sure that we are not just applying generic AI, but we are making sure that the AI, algorithms, and machine learning are taking into account the specificities of each business process.

Brune de Linares, Chief Client Officer & Co-founder – For the insurance industry, it means that you do not have to make a trade-off between performance and transparency anymore, thanks to the technology and these algorithms, but you can have better models in a transparent way, with a transparent output. So that really marks an innovation on that specific use case, and for the industry.

But at Akur8, it's not only about the algorithms. We are convinced that when you want to leverage AI, you also have to build processes and a solution with some functional features around the algorithms, to make sure that you can really leverage these algorithms in production for a business purpose. 

Samuel Falmagne, CEO & Co-founder – And with our algorithms, we are not fully automating the process. We are automating the data-driven part of the process, but at each step of the process, our users, which are actuaries, are going to make decisions. Given we automate the data-driven part, they have much more time for analysis and for spending time on making the actual business decision, instead of doing repetitive tasks that can be automated.

Brune de Linares, Chief Client Officer & Co-founder – I think we can say that our ambition is really to provide the right technologies to the actuaries to help them to make better decisions in a faster way, so it’s really about how to best leverage technology for a business objective.

Recent acquisition of Arius

Brune de Linares, Chief Client Officer & Co-founder – We recently completed our first acquisition, welcoming the Arius team within Akur8.

It means that we are enriching our product portfolio with a reserving solution, Arius, which contributes to the same DNA of providing actuaries with the best solution to support their business processes and their business objectives.

It's a way for us to expand our actuarial platform with additional use cases and to provide the insurance industry with better technology that they can leverage.

It was a very interesting journey to run that acquisition, and we are really happy with the first discussions that we’ve had with our customers, the integration of the team within Akur8, and the dynamics that we see in the market.

Samuel Falmagne, CEO & Co-founder – From the start, it was our vision to build a global, fully integrated actuarial platform leveraging machine learning.

Arius was an opportunity to accelerate our vision. It's not only a product; it's a very experienced and highly skilled team, and more than 140 clients heavily centered on the US.

So that was a unique opportunity for us to drive more value for clients, and we see significant traction on the market. We’ve already signed some combined partnerships with clients, acquiring both reserving and pricing at the same time. So very positive market feedback!

What’s next for Akur8

Samuel Falmagne, CEO & Co-founder – We continue to expand our platform to deliver additional business value to our clients. We’ve already released four modules and are releasing some new modules.

‘Optimization’ was just released, allowing actuaries to find the optimal commercial prices. ‘Deploy’ allows the capability to put your prices into production, so it's the last piece of this process. We’ll release this module in the first quarter of next year.

We also started to work on a new and very differentiated module, which is called the ‘rate repository,’ which will be the missing link between commercial tariffs and the production engine. It's a module that will release at the end of next year.

And then there is, of course, Arius as well, for which we’ve invested a lot in terms of transformation to embed more machine learning to fully migrate Arius to the cloud. We’re still investing massively in R&D and developing our platform.

Brune de Linares, Chief Client Officer & Co-founder – And I think that, of course, we will also continue to expand globally and to increase the size of the team, to be able to support more customers across the different geographies that we have. So there is still lots of work in front of us, and large opportunities that we see for the future!

Learn more about Akur8 and continue to follow the team's innovation journey.