The weeks are a mix of swimming lessons (for my boy) and client meetings (for me).
It’s been good. It’s been busy.
Lots of insurance innovation activity afoot. In fact, I’d go so far as saying the innovation space is picking up, hotting up, and should make for an interesting second half of the year.
This week we’ve got voice agents in claims, IKEA declining to use its own insurance arm, a Serbian unicorn that turns a profit, and a coral reef with its own policy. Nice.
Let’s get into it.
$4bn. And no announcement
So Corgi is reportedly valued at $4bn after a second Series B extension.
Its third raise in eight weeks.
So far we’ve had: $108m Seed + Series A announced in January at a reported valuation near $630m
$160m Series B in early May at $1.3bn
$106m B1 three weeks later backed by many of the same investors at $2.6bn
And now a B extension at $4bn.
Founded 2024 by Nico Laqua and Emily Yuan, Y Combinator alum, it sells D&O, E&O, cyber, CGL, fiduciary and AI liability, mostly to other startups. It also enables other platforms and startups to embed or offer insurance to their own customers.
Interestingly though Corgi hasn’t announced this round. Rather, Forbes reported it from people close to the source whilst Corgi declined to comment beyond saying anything would come from them when they’re ready.
No amount published. No investors named.
Other related data – revenue run rate reportedly is going from $40m in January to $450m by end of 2026. And so far no loss ratio, combined ratio or reserve-adequacy figures made public.
Two years old, and not yet through a hard market, a reserve cycle or a bad quarter.
Should make for continued interesting reading.
99% of $$ went in (not to) one direction
You’ve got to love team Gallagher Re and their quarterly reports.
Q2 landed yesterday…I think.
99.1% of Q2 insurtech funding went to AI-focused companies.
Up from 95.2% in Q1.
Every round above $5m went to an AI business.
I mean, there’s a point where we simply have to assume AI is woven into every business right?
A great quote from Andrew Johnston: “Capital availability is clearly not a problem. And yet we are seeing something of a paradox: at a time when AI is supposed to be making things cheaper, individual insurtechs seem to be raising, then burning through, more cash than ever.”
Indeed.
Another interesting insight is early-stage funding halved quarter on quarter. Re/insurer participation dropped too, to 27 technology investments from 32.
So the recovery is from venture and private equity money, not industry money.
Which in turn leaves a narrower field to choose from. Fewer, bigger, later bets, all labelled AI.
Spotting which of them is actually different, and which you should be working with/investing into is getting harder by the quarter. Luckily there’s a company that can help you: Sønr
IAG is partnering with OpenAI to put voice agents into claims. Australian market first with a focus on high-volume natural perils. Delivery is expected in the first half of FY27.
Just to be super clear, this is solution design at this point – not a live deployment. Nobody’s agent is answering the phone in Sydney. Yet.
And it all runs on OpenAI Presence, which is worth digging into a little.
Presence isn’t a model or an API. It’s a deployed product for running voice and chat agents in production.
Each deployment starts with one job, and the agent only gets the access that job needs. The company sets what it can do, when it needs approval, and when a human takes over.
Before it goes live it’s run against edge cases and scored by graders – a second model marking the first one’s homework. Once live, Codex reads the real sessions and proposes changes a human signs off.
OpenAI‘s proof point for all this is its own phone line.
Within weeks it hit the benchmarks they use to grade human frontline support. It now resolves 75% of inbound calls without a person.
They’ve named three launch customers – IAG, BBVA in Mexico, SoftBank in Japan. One insurer, one bank, one telco.
Related to this is Guidewire’s release of Qusar this week – an Agentic Framework, letting carriers build and govern their own agents on Guidewire Cloud with real-time access to policy, claims and billing data.
Included in it: Agentic FNOL that uses conversational AI voice to walk a claimant through reporting a claim.
More or less the product IAG is designing with OpenAI.
One arriving via a frontier lab and a forward-deployed team, the other via the core systems vendor already inside the building.
No damage, no payout
Swiss Re Institute has global data centre premiums going from $10.6bn to $24.2bn by 2030.
A single AI-optimised facility can cost $20bn to build. Naturally, the banks funding it want the full $20bn insured. Yet the market can’t write cover that big. Not at a price anyone would pay.
Then the bigger problem.
A standard property policy only pays out when something is physically broken. Yet data centres mostly go down because the power cuts out, the cooling fails, or someone misconfigures the software.
None of which ‘breaks’ anything.
So the loss is real and the policy does nothing, and non-damage BI extensions are now one of the most commercially material product opportunities in the category.
The same problem exists for many Europeans caught up in the recent wildfires.
With over 900 sq km burned in Spain, and roughly 1,160 in France, Moody’s counted more than 13,000 businesses evacuated in Gironde alone.
The problem though is in France, BI pays only where the option was bought and the fire caused property damage.
Thirteen thousand businesses. Weeks of lost trading. Premises untouched, so for many of them, no claim.
Reversing this, Munich Re Specialty has launched parametric earthquake cover for Japanese corporations.
It triggers off readings from Japan’s KiK-net and K-NET seismic stations, and pays even where the insured has no physical damage. Aimed at operational delay, supply chain disruption and cash flow.
This is the second parametric entrant into that segment within a year, after HDI Global.
And Willis, with the Caribbean Biodiversity Fund, have launched a coral reef parametric programme covering 1,800km² across the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, St Lucia, and St Vincent and the Grenadines.
Willis’ Dynamic (that’s the important word in this one) Cat-in-Circle is built to track storms outside the circle, and pays on a measurement rather than either not at all or a loss adjuster’s visit.
Four new places to buy insurance. None of them an insurer.
Contents up to £120k, buildings up to £1m, or both. Monthly rolling, bought online in minutes.
IKEA has been selling insurance for over a decade.
Pregnancy and child cover trialled in Swedish stores in 2014. And HEMSÄKER home insurance after that, in Sweden and Singapore.
All this through Ikano, the Kamprad family’s own financial services vehicle, deliberately kept at arm’s length from the furniture business.Ikano Re still reinsures the IKEA franchise system.
A retailer that owns an insurance arm choosing not to use it in a new market, and renting a nine-year-old insurtech’s technology instead. I like it.
Meanwhile Mapfre has taken 38.9% of Tuio, the Spanish AI-native digital distributor.
Tuio has a 100,000+ customers across home, car and life, all digital.
Tuio was also – as I’m sure many of us will recall – the first insurance app anywhere to integrate into ChatGPT for direct policy sales. What’s interesting is, since February, more than 20% of its new customers have arrived through AI assistants.
Whilst a few others are experimenting with AI distribution, Mapfre has bought a distribution channel that didn’t exist eighteen months ago, and a set of learnings, at a price nobody has a comparable for.
A couple of examples of those stepping in this past fortnight:
●Plymouth Rock opened home insurance quoting inside ChatGPT across all six states it writes in.
●And Brokly launched a commercial app that takes a trade and a state and tells a small business what cover it’s legally required to carry. It’ll also read the insurance clause of a contract and show you where your policy falls short. Advises rather than sells.
One more relating to M&A – two weeks after closing their $100m round, Cover Genius has acquired Friendsurance, the Berlin digital bancassurance platform.
Raised on the 14th, spent it by the 28th. Strong work
Ron ran Firemark Ventures at IAG for a good many years before setting up 11eight in Sydney. He’s also been involved in a tonne of Sønr activity throughout the years and definitely a guy to know/follow.
Tokio Marine is reportedly exploring a major Australian acquisition, with IAG and Suncorp both named as possible targets. Talk of up to A$20bn.
Tokio Marine’s other move is smaller and more interesting.
It has made a strategic investment in Kita, the UK carbon insurance specialist and Lloyd’s coverholder, through Tokio Marine & Nichido Fire. It builds on existing work with Tokio Marine Kiln on political risk cover for carbon transactions.
And Mitsui Sumitomo and Aioi Nissay Dowa have gone live with detection for claim images created or altered by generative AI, built with TechUnion, with a joint patent application across the three of them.
Reading into this – it doesn’t only look at damage photos, it screens repair estimates and receipts too, for signs of AI generation, alteration or reuse from elsewhere.
The unicorn that turns a profit
Ominimo raised $22.5m at a $1.6bn valuation. Serbia’s first tech unicorn.
Founded in 2024 by three ex-McKinsey consultants, their premium run rate went from about €26m in 2024 to €158m in 2025 to roughly €307m now. Close to a million customers across four markets served by 130 people, two thirds of which in data science or engineering.
Oh and it’s profitable (which at Series B shouldn’t be all that remarkable…but kinda still is).
Meanwhile Lemonade closed Q2 with 3,308,666 customers, up 23%, in-force premium of $1.43bn, up 32%, premium per customer at $433. Revenue up 79%.
Its eleventh consecutive quarter of accelerating growth, and still a $43m net loss.
Thermal batteries and payroll compliance
I appreciate this is a long one already.
Keep strong, we’ll get there.
Something I’ve always been keen on, since early Sønr days, is tracking what’s going on around the edges of insurance.
These guys are automating prevailing-wage monitoring, apprenticeship compliance, certified-payroll review and audit reporting for energy, infrastructure, construction and manufacturing projects.
Two carriers, both writing cheques into the industrial base they underwrite rather than into software that helps them underwrite it. Interesting right?
$90m raised across the region in the first half of the year. 576 active insurtechs now, up 14% year on year. And the failure rate is down to 7%, its lowest in years.
Eighteen insurtechs in the region are now doing agentic AI, from near enough nothing two years ago. And the category growing fastest, at 36% a year, is tooling for traditional agents and brokers, which tells you something.
Hugues’ own read: a single-country insurtech is now four times more likely to disappear than one operating across borders.
African insurtech got its own report this week, from the investment firm AfricInvest.
Companies across the continent have raised over $300m in five years, peaking at $80.6m in 2025.
Kenya’s investment figures come second behind South Africa, and AfricInvest put that down to the BimaLab accelerator and the regulatory sandbox, which have pushed Nairobi up alongside Johannesburg and Lagos.
We’ve proudly been the Lab’s scouting partner for a good few years now, which means our tech sits behind the applications through to the scoring. It also provides us an invaluable window into hundreds of emerging and established companies every six months.
Pitch Day is 10 September. Programme starts on the 28th. Demo Day 9 December.
It’s one of my favourites every year and by all accounts they’ve had a record number of entries, so it should be a decent read on what the market is up to.
Right. That’s me. Done.
It’s Bristol Balloon Fiesta for me tonight, a solo pro Hyrox tomorrow, and then the longest run I’ve ever done on Sunday.
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