To help develop an insurance platform for autonomous vehicles and robotics, insurance technology startup Koop Technologies has received $2.5 million in seed funding, the company announced August 23.
Pittsburgh-based Koop is partnering with a number of the largest insurance companies in the world to develop special programs for autonomous vehicle and robotics clients. It securely collects data from autonomous vehicle and robotics companies and uses it for insurance underwriting, cost of risk and claims handling purposes.
The company noted that such insurance and financial products will hopefully lead to faster and cheaper commercialization of autonomous technologies by helping both developer-operators and insurers make significantly better risk transfer and pricing decisions.
“Our team has built a whole new insurance experience and set of tools around data sharing for robotics clients,” Kamron Khodjaev, co-founder and chief commercial officer, said in a statement. “With the rapid adoption of automation technologies, the risk landscape changes across many use cases, and the only way to properly handle those risks is with the help of high-quality data.”
Koop aims to use this funding to bring its insurance platform to more customers in the autonomous vehicle and robotics industries.
“We learned firsthand about a lot of insurance pain points that developers and operators have to go through to get appropriate coverage,” Sergey Litvinenko, Koop’s co-founder and CEO, said in a statement. “Our product not only solves those pain points, but also goes a step further by offering risk insights, embedded integrations, and many other useful features for our clients.”
This seed round was led by deep tech fund Ubiquity Ventures, along with Bee Partners, Sure Ventures, WestWave Capital and a number of strategic angel investors.
“As a VC investor, I see Koop as the critical bridge between the insurance industry and the autonomous cars, drones and robotics industries,” Sunil Nagaraj, founding partner at Ubiquity Ventures, said in a statement. “It is rare to see such a well-timed company with such a well-suited team. Koop is a critical enabler of mass adoption of autonomy and robotics,” Nagaraj will be joining Koop’s board.
“We know how challenging it is to build a new insurance company from the ground up,” Garrett Goldberg, general partner at Bee Partners, said in a statement. “Sergey and the team have done a tremendous job identifying an immense current and future need in the market, and are building strong product and technical foundations to grow the business profitably. We are excited to support Koop for the long haul on their journey.”
