Axle, an insurance technology company building an AI-native clearinghouse for insurance data and workflows, raised $17.5 mn in Series A funding led by Base10 Partners.
Y Combinator and Gradient also participated in the round, alongside Stage 2 Capital and industry investors including the founders of Cover Genius. Existing investors include members of Plaid’s early team.
Axle said it has tripled the number of workflows it automates over the past six months and now clears more than $100 bn in insurance coverage annually for more than 4,000 auto dealers, rental car companies, mortgage lenders, auto lenders and employers.
Its customers include Rocket Mortgage, Avis, Experian and Sonic Automotive. The company said its technology has made insurance-related workflows 20 times faster and helped customers recover hundreds of millions of dollars in losses.
Jordan Bannantine, Head of Risk Management at SIXT, said Axle allows the rental car company to verify renters insurance instantly and has helped it recover millions of dollars in losses that would previously have been written off each year.
Before Axle, verifying a renter’s insurance meant either absorbing the risk or slowing the customer down at the counter. Axle gives us an instant, accurate answer at the moment it matters and has helped us recover millions in losses we used to write off each year.
Jordan Bannantine, Head of Risk Management at SIXT
Axle said businesses that depend on insurance still rely heavily on phone calls, faxed documents and manual processes to verify, update and monitor policies. A mortgage lender, for example, may interact with insurance more than 10 times a year for a single loan.
The fragmentation is partly caused by insurers operating multiple policy systems and storing significant amounts of information in unstructured documents.
Axle’s infrastructure connects to those systems, routes requests to the appropriate source and standardizes unstructured insurance data through a single API. The platform is designed to automate processes including policy verification, coverage checks, policy updates and monitoring for changes.
Adeyemi Ajao, co-founder and Managing Partner at Base10 Partners, said insurance remains one of the economy’s most manual industries despite its importance to transactions including vehicle purchases, mortgages and rentals. He said Base10 believes products will increasingly be built on infrastructure that makes insurance data programmable.
In 2026, no one should be faxing PDFs or sitting on hold to confirm a policy. Few real economy industries are more foundational or more manual than insurance. The Axle team built the rails that make insurance programmable, and we believe a generation of products will be built on top of them.
Adeyemi Ajao, Co-founder and Managing Partner at Base10 Partners
Axle plans to use the new funding to expand its engineering and go-to-market teams and extend its clearinghouse into more than 50 segments across Home, Auto, Renters, Commercial and Specialty insurance.
The company also plans to deepen direct relationships with insurance carriers, which Axle said are increasingly using its platform as a governed gateway for insurance data and transactions.
Axle was founded by Cameron Duncan, Armaan Sikand and Nihar Parikh, who have known each other for 15 years. The founders previously worked on products and services for automotive manufacturers, rental car companies and mortgage lenders at Deloitte Digital and Cox Automotive.
The founders said Axle aims to create a standardized clearinghouse for insurance similar to infrastructure already used in credit, payments, identity and income.
