Axle, a technology company developing an AI-native clearinghouse for the insurance industry, has raised USD $17.5 million in Series A funding as it expands its platform for automating insurance verification and policy-related processes.
The funding round was led by Base10 Partners, with further investment from existing backers Y Combinator and Gradient. Stage 2 Capital and a group of insurance industry angel investors, including the founders of Cover Genius, also took part. Axle said members of the early Plaid team are among its existing investors.
The company stated that it now processes more than USD $100 billion in insurance coverage each year on behalf of more than 4,000 organisations. Its customers span areas including car dealerships, vehicle rental, mortgage lending, automotive finance and employment, with Axle saying its client base includes companies such as Rocket Mortgage, Avis, Experian and Sonic Automotive.
The number of workflows handled by its platform has tripled over the past six months. It also claims its technology has reduced the time required for these processes by up to 20 times and has helped customers recover hundreds of millions of dollars in previously unrecovered losses.
For vehicle rental businesses, insurance verification can be particularly time-sensitive. Jordan Bannantine, Head of Risk Management at SIXT, said the company had previously faced a choice between taking on additional risk or slowing customers down while insurance was checked.
“Before Axle, verifying a renter’s insurance meant either absorbing the risk or slowing the customer down at the counter,” added Bannantine. “Axle gives us an instant, accurate answer at the moment it matters and has helped us recover millions in losses we used to write off each year.”
Axle’s platform is designed to address what the company describes as a fragmented insurance technology infrastructure. While insurance is involved in many major financial and commercial transactions, Axle said businesses still frequently depend on manual processes, including phone calls, faxed documents and other forms of document-based communication, to establish whether policies are valid and meet specific requirements.
The company estimates that insurance represents an $8.3 trillion USD industry and points to the lack of a standardised system for accessing policy information as one reason for the continued reliance on manual processes. Large insurers can operate multiple policy administration systems, with information often stored in documents that are not structured for direct use by software.
Axle’s technology is intended to connect with these different systems and retrieve information from them, while converting data from unstructured documents into a standardised format. The resulting API is designed to allow businesses and AI-powered software to carry out insurance-related tasks without relying on separate manual interactions with individual insurers.
These tasks can include checking whether a customer has appropriate insurance, confirming that coverage satisfies a company’s requirements, requesting policy changes and monitoring whether information on a policy has been updated.
“In 2026, no one should be faxing PDFs or sitting on hold to confirm a policy,” commented Adeyemi Ajao, Co-founder and Managing Partner at Base10 Partners. “Few real economy industries are more foundational or more manual than insurance. The Axle team built the rails that make insurance programmable, and we believe a generation of products will be built on top of them.”
The latest investment will be used to increase hiring in engineering and go-to-market roles. The company intends to broaden its platform from the five markets in which it has established its model to more than 50 insurance segments covering areas including home, motor, renters, commercial and specialty insurance.
The company also plans to build closer relationships with insurers. Axle said carriers are increasingly using its technology as a controlled gateway through which their systems and insurance data can be accessed by businesses and software applications.
The company was founded by Cameron Duncan, Armaan Sikand and Nihar Parikh, who have known each other for 15 years. Before establishing Axle, the three worked on products and services for automotive manufacturers, rental car businesses and mortgage lenders at Deloitte Digital and Cox Automotive.
The founders said their experience highlighted the lack of a central infrastructure layer connecting insurance providers with the businesses that depend on their data.
“Everything the economy runs on – credit, payments, identity, income – has a clearinghouse in the middle. Insurance never has,” said Axle co-founders Duncan, Sikand, and Parikh. “We’re building it. Once insurance is standardised and programmable, it becomes far more valuable to the carriers who write it, the businesses that rely on it, and the hundreds of millions of consumers it protects.”
