(Image source: Fairmatic homepage.)
Fairmatic (Reno, Nev.), an AI-powered commercial auto insurance company, has announced it has raised $46 million in new funding, six months after its oversubscribed Series A, bringing its total financing to $88 million. Battery Ventures (Boston) led the round with participation from current investors and Bridge Bank (San Jose, Calif.).
Jonathan Matus, founder and CEO, Fairmatic.
Fairmatic bills itself as creating a new commercial auto insurance category with an AI-driven underwriting approach that the company says unlocks continuous savings opportunities for fleets. Fairmatic says it is giving fleets more proactive control over their risk management approach providing an easy way to monitor driving events and offering actionable improvement tips.
“This fair and transparent underwriting approach unlocks a better understanding of risk, ensuring fleets are only evaluated based on factors within their control,” a Fairmatic statement says. “With Fairmatic, fleets are incentivized for safer driving and not penalized for unavoidable incidents. This diverges from traditional insurance models that rely on historical data, which has led to losses and overpriced premiums, especially upon renewal.”
“Fairmatic addresses the central requirement of improving commercial auto insurance: motivating safer driving,” comments Marcus Ryu, partner, Battery Ventures and former CEO and co-founder of Guidewire Software (San Mateo, Calif.). “The company does so by capturing the rich data signal generated by our smartphones and applying it to the task of identifying unsafe driving behavior, which enables Fairmatic to offer insurance products that both reward fleet managers for safer driving and potentially achieve greater profitability than traditional, loss-based approaches to underwriting and pricing.”
Marcus Ryu, Partner, Battery Ventures.
“We are excited to partner with Fairmatic as an exemplar of fundamental innovation in financial services,” adds Ryu. “Fulfillment of the company’s mission will entail more than just convenience and lower insurance costs for their customers; it will enhance the safety of the roads we all rely upon every day.”
Completely New Approach
“New developments in AI, combined with troves of proprietary driving insights, have allowed Fairmatic to unlock a completely new approach to addressing the most critical questions in commercial auto insurance: which drivers are safe and which aren’t; how insurers can help drivers improve safety and reduce risk,” comments Jonathan Matus, founder and CEO, Fairmatic. “With this powerful new technology for improving driver behavior, there’s a massive opportunity to reframe the problem and solution from first principles. This new funding strengthens Fairmatic’s lead in AI innovation geared towards meaningfully improved road safety and profitability.”
Guy Shaviv, Head of Engineering, Fairmatic.
Following its Series B, Fairmatic reports that it is scaling its AI and data-science capabilities by opening a new R&D hub in Israel and tapping seasoned technologist and former NASA researcher, Guy Shaviv, as the new Head of Engineering in Israel.
“Israel has some of the world’s finest talent for both InsurTech and mobility,” comments Shaviv, who built mobile at Nexar, a fleet dash cam company for fleet management, and was employee No. 1 at Houzz, a unicorn with 65 million users. “Folks here are creative, smart, and aggressive—exactly what a startup at our stage needs.”
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