Insurance infrastructure startup Axle has raised $17.5 million in a Series A round led by Base10 Partners, giving the company fresh capital to expand a platform designed to automate insurance verification and other policy-related workflows.
The round also saw participation from returning investors Y Combinator and Gradient, while Stage 2 Capital joined as a new backer. Angel investors included the founders of CoverGenius and members of Plaid’s founding team.
Axle is targeting a part of the insurance industry that still involves significant manual work. A mortgage lender, for instance, may need to contact an insurance carrier more than 10 times in a year simply to confirm that one customer’s coverage remains active. The startup is building technology intended to replace such repetitive checks with automated, programmable workflows.
The company says its insurance clearinghouse now processes more than $100 billion in coverage annually across more than 4,000 customers, including Rocket Mortgage, Avis, Experian and Sonic Automotive.
At the core of Axle’s platform is an API that connects with fragmented carrier systems, directs requests to the appropriate source and standardises the information returned. That structure allows business applications and AI systems to retrieve insurance data through a common interface rather than navigating separate carrier processes individually.
One example is rental car company SIXT, which uses Axle to verify renters’ insurance at the counter. The process gives the company an immediate coverage answer without slowing down the customer or forcing staff to absorb uncertainty around whether a policy is valid. SIXT head of risk management Jordan Bannantine said Axle has also helped the company recover millions of dollars in losses it previously wrote off each year.
Axle says the number of workflows automated through its platform has tripled over the past six months, while those workflows have become 20 times faster. The company also says customers have recovered more than $220 million in losses using its technology.
The startup was founded in 2022 by Cameron Duncan, Armaan Sikand and Nihar Parikh, who met while studying at Emory University. The three later worked together at Deloitte Digital and Cox Automotive. Duncan, Axle’s chief executive, previously led product at Clutch, the automotive subscription business acquired by Cox Automotive.
Rather than selling insurance or underwriting policies itself, Axle is positioning its technology as connective infrastructure that can work across carriers and insurance categories. Its founders see an opportunity to create a standardised layer for insurance similar to the clearinghouse systems already used in areas such as payments, credit, identity and income.
The new funding represents a sharp increase in capital for the business. Before the Series A, Axle had raised $4 million in seed funding led by Gradient Ventures, with backing from Y Combinator, Soma Capital, Contrary Capital, Rebel Fund and BLH Ventures, among others.
Axle plans to use the Series A proceeds to expand its engineering and go-to-market teams and extend its clearinghouse across more than 50 insurance segments, covering areas including home, auto, renters, commercial and speciality insurance.
The expansion will test whether businesses increasingly prefer a shared connectivity layer for accessing insurance information rather than continuing to rely on carrier-specific systems and manual verification. For Axle, the $17.5 million round provides the resources to push that infrastructure model across a much wider section of the insurance market.
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