NEW YORK — Axle, an AI-native clearinghouse for insurance, has raised $17.5 million in Series A funding led by Base10 Partners. The round included continued investment from Y Combinator and Gradient, with participation from Stage 2 Capital and industry angels, including the founders of Cover Genius. They join existing investors, including the early team at Plaid.
In the last six months, Axle has tripled the workflows it automates and now clears more than $100 billion in coverage annually for over 4,000 auto dealers, rental car companies, mortgage lenders, auto lenders, and employers – a roster that includes dozens of Fortune 500 customers such as Rocket Mortgage, Avis, Experian, and Sonic Automotive. Axle has sped up these workflows by 20x while recovering hundreds of millions in losses for its customers.
“Before Axle, verifying a renter’s insurance meant either absorbing the risk or slowing the customer down at the counter,” said Jordan Bannantine, Head of Risk Management at SIXT. “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 plans to use this fresh capital to hire across engineering and go-to-market, expanding its clearinghouse to more than 50 segments spanning Home, Auto, Renters, Commercial, and Specialty insurance, while deepening direct relationships with carriers who increasingly use Axle as a governed gateway.
Axle was founded by Cameron Duncan, Armaan Sikand, and Nihar Parikh who have been friends for 15 years. They experienced the problem firsthand while building new products and services for automotive manufacturers, rental car companies, and mortgage lenders at Deloitte Digital and Cox Automotive.
“Everything the economy runs on – credit, payments, identity, income – has a clearinghouse in the middle. Insurance never has,” said Axle co-founders Cameron Duncan, Armaan Sikand, and Nihar Parikh. “We’re building it. Once insurance is standardized 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.”
