• Cytora

  Participated · Series A · Jan 2017

  Cytora provides an AI-powered underwriting platform that ingests public and proprietary data — including property construction features, company financials, local weather and an insurer’s internal risk data — to score commercial insurance risk via APIs. The platform’s risk engine learns patterns of good and bad risks over time and, the company says, can reduce a typical seven-day underwriting process to about 30 seconds. Typical customers are commercial insurers: underwriters handling large commercial risks (average premium ~£500k+) and business customers buying online with average premiums of £1,000–£5,000. Cytora generates revenue via an annual recurring license fee that scales with usage and per line of business. The company launched its first product in late 2016 and positions its tooling to enable programmatic underwriting and faster quotation workflows. The Series B will be used to accelerate expansion of its product suite and to scale into new geographies. Cytora has developed a Risk Engine that applies NLP and machine learning developed at the University of Cambridge to identify patterns of good and bad risks over time. The technology enables commercial insurers to target, select and price risk more accurately, aiming for improved loss ratios and premium growth while delivering fairer prices to customers. The company was nurtured by the University of Cambridge’s Judge Business School Accelerate Programme and initially supported by Cambridge Enterprise. Led by CEO Richard Hartley, Cytora plans to deploy its Risk Engine internationally across property and casualty lines with a core group of insurers. The company said it will use the funds to increase its data science and engineering capacity. Cytora is based in London and Cambridge, UK. Cytora is a Cambridge and London, UK-based spin-out from the University of Cambridge that uses AI and machine learning to capture hidden economic insights in online data. Its technology gives clients a comprehensive overview of what is changing in the world and the ability to extract leading indicators and opportunities. The company focuses on core markets of supply chain risk management and financial services. It works with major financial services and insurance companies. Founded in 2013, Cytora is a 20-person company. The company intends to use the funds to drive further growth in its core markets and to further develop its event-detection technology. Cytora collects raw data from millions of web sources to detect and geolocate real-world events in real time and distributes that data in multiple ways to facilitate integration and use. Its product is used by risk advisories and consultancies to produce risk models and intelligence, airlines to spot reported ground-to-air missile incidents, global corporates to monitor supply chains, and investment banks and hedge funds to assess asset exposure. Led by co-founder Richard Hartley, the company focuses on event detection across varied event types (port strikes, protests, weather events, fires, etc.). Cytora intends to use the new funding to grow in its core markets of supply chain risk management and financial services. It also plans to further develop its event-detection technology. The company raised a second funding round, though the terms were not disclosed; the round was led by Cambridge Enterprise, Parkwalk Advisors and a group of angel investors including Alan Morgan.

No current team members are available.