What initially attracted you to Akur8?

As investors, there are multiple things that we look out for when considering investment opportunities: we of course like large and rapidly growing markets, highly scalable business models, great products, strong unit economics, strategic value in light of a future exit, and many additional criteria we consider when investing. However, for me, the real differentiator between good and world class is the team. And this is where Sam and Brune’s vision and leadership qualities got me really excited about exploring an investment in Akur8. From the minute we started talking, I have been really impressed by Sam and Brune’s passion, desire to win, focus, and hunger to build a category defining company.

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What set Akur8 apart from other companies in the same industry?

As part of our due diligence, we spoke to many customers, who were all very complimentary about the Akur8 team. In fact, a professional, friendly, and responsive team, with deep domain expertise, was consistently mentioned by our customers as one of the main reasons for working with Akur8. Insurance is a big market, but a small ecosystem, with market participants frequently talking to each other and in some cases moving from one firm to another. Akur8’s customer centricity and great reputation in the marketplace therefore make a real difference and will continue to serve the company well. So we’ve got to keep our standards up!

From a product perspective, the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive too. Our extensive market work concludes that Akur8 has built a truly differentiated actuarial platform on the back of years of customer-centric development, which we believe gives Akur8 the right to win in a sizeable and rapidly growing market!

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What opportunities do you see for Akur8 in terms of scaling or entering new markets?

Insurance is a notoriously difficult industry to sell into, and one of the things I find most impressive is the fact that we have signed really blue-chip logos in more than 40 different countries, some of which are large Tier 1s. Winning the first one or two reference customers in any given geography is really hard; yet we have managed to do so in many countries. That is super impressive and a great basis to scale from, by further investing in sales and marketing. Dominating the US market will be key in my view, due to the sheer size of the market.

Also, no actuarial platform is available with a similarly broad functional scope in the market today. The holistic end-to-end nature of our platform is a real strength in my view. Additional reserving capabilities with the acquisition of Arius, as well as bringing Optim, Rate Repository, and Pricing Engine into general availability, will only add to our competitive moat, and will also create significant cross-sell opportunities. All super exciting avenues for growth acceleration!

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How do you see the future of Akur8?

I think everyone should be proud of their achievements and take a moment to celebrate how far we’ve come on our journey as a team, and celebrate the fact that we have nothing but a bright future ahead! I am really looking forward to working together and hopefully getting to know many of you along the journey!

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