Huscarl raises US$5.6 million in seed funding to build what it describes as the first autonomous artificial intelligence actuary for corporations and their captives. FRST leads the round, with participation from Y Combinator and Silicon Valley investors. The company uses the capital to develop the platform and expand its capabilities in the US market. The platform automates the ingestion of large volumes of unstructured data, generates bespoke risk models for emerging or unusual risks, and orchestrates actuarial workflows from end to end. Every study is reviewed and signed by a credentialed human actuary. Huscarl provides one-off actuarial studies, ongoing appointed actuary services for captives, and outsourced underwriting for group captives and risk retention groups. The company says it has been used by a risk retention group and by a single-parent captive for a company with more than US$2 billion in revenue, and is looking to expand its network of partner captive managers and brokers. Huscarl says self-insurance has surged in recent years, with US companies retaining risk rather than transferring it and setting up captives, citing cost savings of up to 30 per cent and the ability to manage risks traditional insurers refuse to absorb. Alexandre Musy, chief executive officer, and Paulien Jeunesse, chief technology officer, created the first cyber parametric insurance product for corporations at Descartes Underwriting. Musy scaled it commercially across Europe while Jeunesse, an actuary and artificial intelligence scientist, built the underlying model. Musy says: "Huscarl was born out of one strong belief: corporations should manage their own risks like insurance companies. Our goal is clear: to enable ambitious corporate risk managers to become their own company's Chief Underwriting Officer. We're working towards a future where self-insurance becomes the default, and commercial insurance becomes the exception." Bruno Raillard, co-founder and partner at FRST, says: "The growth of self-insurance has been a major trend of the last ten years, to a point where the world's largest corporations now self-insure close to 100 per cent of their risks. On the other side of the spectrum, companies as small as $10 million in revenue are starting to consider it as an alternative to traditional insurance. The team at Huscarl is building the critical infrastructure for this market."
