Insurtech Fairmatic bags another $46m; taps former NASA researcher

Insurtech Fairmatic, an AI-powered commercial auto insurance provider, has raised $46 million in new funding, six months after its oversubscribed Series A, bringing its total financing to $88 million.

The round was led by Battery Ventures with participation from current investors and Bridge Bank.

Fairmatic intends to create a new commercial auto insurance category with its AI-driven underwriting approach to unlocking savings opportunities for fleets. The insurtech aims to offer fleets more proactive control over their risk management approach by incentivising safer driving and not penalising for unavoidable incidents.

As part of its Series B, Fairmatic plans to scale up its AI and data-science capabilities by opening a new R&D hub in Israel and tap 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,” said Shaviv, who built mobile at Nexar, a fleet dash cam company for fleet management, and worked at Houzz, a unicorn with 65 million users.

Jonathan Matus (pictured), Fairmatic founder and CEO, said: “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 can insurers help drivers improve safety and reduce risk. 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.”

Battery Ventures Partner Marcus Ryu, the former CEO and co-founder of insurtech company Guidewire Software, added: “Fairmatic addresses the central requirement of improving commercial auto insurance: motivating safer driving. 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.”

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