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Announcing our $4m seed led by Gradient Ventures

April 10, 2023
2 minutes read
Axle co-founders Nihar Parikh (CTO), Cameron Duncan (CEO), and Armaan Sikand (COO)

Over $13B is lost each year from uninsured motorists, and mortgages and auto loans are prohibitively expensive for many borrowers. Why?

Despite the availability of connective technology in many other industries (e.g., banking), the insurance industry still relies heavily on legacy systems, paper, and lengthy phone calls to interact with third parties. This leaves high-risk organizations, such as rental car companies, lenders, and gig services, struggling to accurately assess risk and make informed decisions at scale.

That's where Axle comes in. We bridge the gap between insurance lines and their parallel industries through a universal API for insurance data, enabling our clients to make business decisions in seconds instead of hours.

Like other user-permissioned data platforms such as Plaid, we allow users to connect their insurance account to trusted companies in seconds.

Axle Ignition - our consent interface - and the Axle Dashboard

Welcome to the team, Google

We're thrilled to announce that we’ve raised $4 million led by Gradient Ventures, Google's AI-focused venture fund. The round also included continued investment from Y Combinator and participation from Soma Capital, Contrary Capital, Rebel Fund, BLH Ventures, and industry angels including members of the founding team of Plaid and former executives from Cox Automotive.

“Axle’s innovative approach to insurance and commitment to a personalized customer experience has already demonstrated early traction and validates their potential to make a significant impact in the market. We look forward to supporting the team and their mission to democratize access to insurance data.” - Wen-wen Lam, Partner at Gradient Ventures.

As founders, fundraising in this environment is a competitive process. We were fortunate to not only find investors quickly, but find ones with deep technical and market expertise. We're excited to work with Gradient and the rest of our new investors as we embark on our next chapter 🚀.

What’s next?

We're proud to say that in less than a year since launching, we've grown our carrier network to hundreds of insurance carriers and support a range of policy information including term, insureds, premiums, third parties and many more.

We plan to use the funds to grow our team, enabling us to service new and existing demand from our fast-growing list of customers, strengthen our carrier network, and expand into new markets. Building a robust and accurate platform around unstructured data has its unique challenges, but we’re excited to leverage the latest tools to offer leading accuracy and reliability.

If you’re a prospective client, please reach out to us to get started integrating our developer-friendly API, or using one of our low-code or no-code options.

If you’re a prospective team member, check out our job board for open roles and to learn more about our team. Please don’t hesitate to reach out!

Interested in learning more about our raise and what's next? Check out TechCrunch's coverage of our round.