AI Insurtech ominimo bags of its first investment in valuation of $ 220 million

How do you get talented engineers to work for a boot in a secular field in a time when more exciting companies pay well and hire aggressively? Following is an answer from an insurance start from Poland called Gay: Make the fee competitive, but most importantly, give their engineers the permission to apply their talent and discover how the field works.

Started with a bootstrapped budget just 12 months ago, Ominimo believes that a different and better approach to understanding and risk of pricing has been found. The company says it is already profitable and growing quickly, with 300,000 policies registered in the first market in Hungary. Now, in order to feed the next stage of life, he is taking his first external investment from a strategic supporter, the Zurich insurance team.

TechCrunch understands from sources that Zurich is investing € 10 million (about $ 11 million) for 5% of the company, valuing OMINIMO at € 200 million ($ 220 million). Neither Ominimo nor Zurich commented on the amount invested, but both confirmed the valuation.

Ominimo has increased funding at a time when one of the most well-known and well-covered insurance companies in Europe-the once unicorn Wefox-is Sale of parts of his business and receipt financing to I remain in life.

Wefox serves both as a warning story about how to develop an insurance business, but also a clear opportunity. Undoubtedly the reason that Wefox increased so quickly was due to demand in the market (both by consumers and by investors) – a startup only had to surf this wave without wiping.

Ominimo is already profitable, but it is undoubtedly a moderate attempt. Today the start is active in a single market, Hungary and focuses only on one type of insurance, car insurance for consumers. The plan is to reproduce its model in more geographical areas and categories.

The company plans to expand to more than 10 new markets, starting from Poland, Sweden and the Netherlands. Zurich’s insurance will serve as a risk carrier and Ominimo will act as a broker, in particular Managing agentFor Zurich. The start focuses first on car insurance, but intends to add real estate insurance over time.

Dusan Komar, Managing Director of Ominimo, who founded the company with Dennis Weinbender (now head of pricing and data responsible) and Laslo Horvath (CTO), saw the challenges that the insurance industry faced firsthand when he worked for McKinsey. Large insurance companies, they said, were stuck due to three main issues: systems of rigid older systems that were provocative, if not impossible, to be used to start new services quickly or work with newer innovations such as pricing based on the AI. Slow decision -making processes at the corporate level; and talent.

“There is no brilliant software engineer or data scientist dreams of working for an insurance company,” he said.

McKinsey and others as they are usually called upon to try to correct all three at the same time. Komar and his team will build new products from the ground and “deliver the code” to the insurance customer. “He worked to some extent, but not as perfect as we were to hope,” he said.

Taking a slogan from the worlds of Fintech and other insurance companies, Komar and his two co -founders saw the opportunity to develop a product as their own company and not for a customer. They would use API to connect features and functions from other providers who may not build themselves and thus was born Ominimo.

OMINIMO essentially applies some AI -based reasoning around the large data detailed data. When building and pricing an insurance offer, a traditional insurance company can use five or six main parameters (age, economic arm, vehicle type, driving history in the past or car location) to determine a price. A younger insurer can add another 10 or 15 parameters to it.

“But there are some not so obvious variables that they are really extremely important,” Komar said. For example, once you receive the license plate of a vehicle, you can use a database, said, which gives you 100 different variables about the vehicle, including length, height, width and weight of the vehicle. “It is interesting, for example, to see that the data shows a very strong correlation between the length of the car and the frequency of accidents during the parking lot,” he said.

Ominimo receives all these details, as well as the density of the population and much more, to perform its calculations.

There are, of course, many insurance companies on the market that already use the use of AI on their platforms, both to make back-end decisions and to improve customer experience in the front-end. The existence of dozens of newly established companies in Fintech who also claim to be built on AI.

Komar’s answer to this is that Ominimo’s history talks about himself. “I think what really matters is actually the performance in the market, so if you compare our performance with lemonade [a key competitor]You will really see the difference, “he said, claimed that Ominimo’s” Loss Reason “is below the market average and has already taken a 7% market share in Hungary, the only country where it operates.

As with many of the Neobanks on the market – Fintech and insurance really have a lot in common – many “new” insurance players make less disorder under the hood as they create a more modern user experience.

“There is a difference between the assertion of data science in terms of risk evaluation and actually do it,” he said. Many of his competitors, he believes, “have really focused on the highest customer experience, very nice front-ends, very lean and intuitive trips, but there weren’t much under the hood.”

Giving talent a place to do the kind of work they want to do, he claimed, is how Ominimo has attracted and maintained basic people. “We have eight metals from the Olympics of Mathematics and Physics [prestigious competitions in these fields] Between our data science team, “he said.” These are truly brilliant young minds that now, for the first time, to develop their full potential on a global scale. And that really shows the kpi we see. ”

This is also what attracted Zurich’s insurance, which is looking for more different ways to bring new waves of customers.

“The development of our retail business is a key ambition in Zurich’s 2025-2027 cycle. That’s why I’m happy with Da Direkt’s distribution corporate distribution with Ominimo, which will allow us to offer innovative car insurance solutions and expand our retail customer base in Europe, beyond the markets in which Zurich is already present, “said Alison, CEO of EUROPE, Afgaint at Zurich, Zurich is already present. ” “I am also happy to reinforce our relationship with a minority minority in ominimo.”