Raising Series A+ to accelerate our growth
We kicked off 2024 with a Series A+ fundraise of £8M. The investment was led by Europe’s premier publicly listed fintech fund, Augmentum Fintech, with participation from existing investors MS&AD Ventures and FOMCAP IV.
The news led Artificial to be featured as a Deal of the Quarter in Gallagher Re’s esteemed Global Insurtech Report in Q2. You can view the report here.
Our Co-CEO David King also spoke as part of Augmentum’s Capital Markets Day in June, showcasing our specialty insurance technology to the investment community as one of Augmentum’s new portfolio companies.
Transforming specialty insurance with pioneering products
It's also been a fantastic year for our product and engineering teams, who have made significant developments to our augmented broking and digital underwriting tools.
Powering specialty broking with Smart Placement
In 2024 Artificial created Smart Placement, one of the most exciting augmented broking tools in the market. Smart Placement is the only fully-configurable toolkit in the market that creates value through truly digital placement.
The rollout of our Contract Builder tool accelerated, with impressive results. It enables clients to cut contract creation time by 50% and reduce the transposition time from MRCv2 to MRCv3 contracts by 75%. The launch of a dedicated case study with one of our first Contract Builder clients, BMS Group, showcased this success, and the product was nominated for not one, but two, awards.
In early 2024 we announced our exciting partnership with Placing Platform Limited which enables us to provide Contract Builder to 80% of the London Market. If you’re interesting in implementing Contract Builder, get in touch.
We’ve also been working on innovative new applications of augmented broking tools through our Smart Placement product and can’t wait to share more in 2025!
Smart Follow: enhanced specialty underwriting
It was also a standout year for Smart Follow.
The Lloyd's Market Association's landmark report into Enhanced Underwriting was released in late 2024 and confirmed the validity of our predictions about the direction of the London Market. We firmly believe that Smart Follow, Smart Lead and other digital underwriting solutions are becoming an integral part of the industry and we’re excited to be a big part of that change.
Apollo’s renewal of their Smart Follow underwriting class, powered by Artificial, further demonstrated our technology’s potential to revolutionise efficiency and accuracy for underwriters.
Smart Lead gathering pace
Our Smart Lead solutions have also been gaining traction in 2024, and we've seen a high correlation between top performing London Market underwriters and their exploration of new ways of underwriting.
We believe we are uniquely positioned to deliver tools that codify underwriting IP and deliver it digitally at scale in a variety of lead models. Watch this space in 2025.
High-powered data ingestion
Powered by our state-of-the-art generative AI advancements, our document ingestion solution now supports virtually any document type and format, streamlines workflows for brokers and insurers alike, making routine processes smoother and faster than ever.
We've also been working with dedicated data partners to enhance this offering; in May we integrated with the ACORD Transcriber API to add yet another data extraction capability to our broking and underwriting tools.
Welcoming new faces to the team
The Artificial team grew significantly this year, with 20 brilliant new starters joining us!
A big Artificial welcome to:
Abby Sassel, Haskell Engineer
Sasha Vorontsov, Full Stack Engineer
Sean Chalmers, Haskell Engineer
Rosie Culbertson, People Operations Specialist
Greg Gyimesi, Engineer
Stefano Butera, Full Stack Engineer
Caitlin O’Riordan, Office Manager
Diana Fulger, Senior Haskell Engineer
Ollie Tian, Machine Learning Engineer
Jasmine Nelson, Product Manager
Jon Lay, Digital Product Strategy Consultant
Holly Millar, Senior Client Success Manager
Rob Hough, Product Designer
Josh Hockley, Junior Product Engineer
Paul Henderson, Solutions Engineer
Ed Howkins, Chief Growth Officer
Natalie Hazelton, Head of Client Onboarding
George Bennett, Product Manager
Josh Bailey, Client Operations Lead
Vivek Anishetty, Lead Security Engineer
This is the most new team members in one year since Artificial’s inception over 11 years ago. To accommodate, we needed a bigger office…
Moving to Frederick’s Place
In 2024, we moved into a new space in Frederick’s Place, a stone’s throw away from our old office in Bow Lane.
Whilst we were sad to say goodbye to our home for many years, the new office has more space for our rapidly growing team and several private rooms for key meetings with clients.
And of course, no mention of the new office would be complete without highlighting the coffee machine (a team favourite and possibly our most productive ‘employee’ this year).
Partyficial - bigger than ever
As is tradition, in November the entire team got together from around the UK and Europe to meet up for Partyficial. This year we took the opportunity to formally open the new office (we even had a ribbon cutting), test our skills at Clays and go for some dinner and dancing.
Thank you to our amazing team who travelled in to see the new office and celebrate together!
Spreading the word of Artificial
Our experts were everywhere this year:
Martin shared his thoughts on an Instech podcast episode in September, diving deep into what Smart Follow means for the London Market
Abby took the stage at Lambda World, presenting the case for parallel change in Rest APIs–read her blog on the topic here
David, Ed and Georgie represented us at ITC Vegas, both on stage and in the Live at ITC video interview series
Ed offered his unique perspective on algorithmic underwriting in 2024 at Instech’s ‘Looking back to the future of insurance’ event
Jen featured on the We Are Insurtech Women panel in November, addressing underwriting trends and the arguments for buy vs build
Collaboration is key at industry events
This year we've been talking more about what we do in partnership with our clients and promoting collaboration in the market through our event appearances.
Insurtech Week 2024
Insurtech Week was a standout occasion, and our espresso martini event with Insurtech UK proved to be a crowd-pleaser. This event highlighted the importance of community and collaboration within the industry.
Instech event co-hosted with PPL
After announcing our partnership earlier in the year, we co-hosted an Instech event with PPL in June with the aim of bringing together participants from across the market and again highlighting the power of collaboration.
We were proud to have a packed out house and some fantastic speakers from Lloyd’s, the LMA, Apollo, Howden, Ki, WTW and more.
Lloyd’s breakfast briefing
We held our first Lloyd’s Library breakfast briefing in October on the theme of The power of structured data for brokers and carriers. Our excellent panellists discussed how structured data places the industry in a stronger position to meet future business needs, even those we can't yet anticipate. We hope the event left the audience inspired to create new partnerships and take a fresh look at how they use data in their organisations.
Women in Insurance Awards
We might not have taken home the trophy, but the team had a fantastic night at the Women in Insurance Awards in October celebrating our three nominees–well done to all the worthy winners!
Looking ahead
After such an eventful year, we’re looking forward to some well-deserved rest and recuperation over the festive season. But we’re also excited about what’s to come—new partnerships, team members, and innovative product features are all on the horizon, and that’s just in Q1.
These are the trends we think are going to shape next year. Artificial is in the best position to power brokers and carriers through these changes, so if you'd like to join us, get in touch.
From all of us at Artificial, we wish you a joyful festive season and a prosperous 2025!
Cheers,
The Artificial team 🎄
