Insider Brief
- Axle, the AI-native clearinghouse for insurance, announced $17.5 million in Series A funding led by Base10 Partners, with continued investment from Y Combinator and Gradient, and participation from Stage 2 Capital and industry angels including the founders of Cover Genius.
- Axle now clears more than $100 billion in coverage annually for over 4,000 customers including Rocket Mortgage, Avis, Experian, and Sonic Automotive, speeding up workflows by 20x while recovering hundreds of millions in losses.
- Founded by Cameron Duncan, Armaan Sikand, and Nihar Parikh, Axle will use the new funding to expand its clearinghouse to more than 50 segments spanning Home, Auto, Renters, Commercial, and Specialty insurance while deepening carrier relationships.
PRESS RELEASE — Axle, the AI-native clearinghouse for insurance, announced $17.5M in Series A funding led by Base10 Partners. The round included continued investment from Y Combinator and Gradient, with participation from Stage 2 Capital and industry angels, including the founders of Cover Genius. They join existing investors, including the early team at Plaid.
Axle Clears $100B+ in Coverage Annually
In the last six months, Axle has tripled the workflows it automates and now clears more than $100B in coverage annually for over 4,000 auto dealers, rental car companies, mortgage lenders, auto lenders, and employers — a roster that includes dozens of Fortune 500 customers such as Rocket Mortgage, Avis, Experian, and Sonic Automotive. Axle has sped up these workflows by 20x while recovering hundreds of millions in losses for its customers.
“Before Axle, verifying a renter’s insurance meant either absorbing the risk or slowing the customer down at the counter,” said Jordan Bannantine, Head of Risk Management at SIXT. “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.”
An $8.3 Trillion Industry Running on Paper and Phone Calls
Insurance is the $8.3 trillion1 backbone of the economy: you need it to buy a car, close a mortgage, rent a vehicle, or lease an apartment, yet the businesses that depend on it still run on fax machines and phone calls to verify, update, and monitor policies. In fact, a mortgage lender may engage with insurance more than 10 times a year for a single loan.
The reason is structural: unlike banking and credit, insurance has no common ledger. A single large carrier can run 15 or more separate policy systems, and much of the data still lives in unstructured documents built for brokers, not software.
Axle’s infrastructure and agents integrate into those fragmented systems, routing requests to the right one, and normalize unstructured data into a single standard. This creates one clean API that software and AI agents can build on to automate the workflows the economy runs on: Does my customer have insurance? Does it meet my requirements? Can you update it? Has anything changed?
“In 2026, no one should be faxing PDFs or sitting on hold to confirm a policy,” said Adeyemi Ajao, Co-founder and Managing Partner at Base10 Partners. “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.”
New Funding Will Accelerate Axle’s AI-Native Insurance Clearinghouse
Having proven the model in five distinct markets, Axle will use this fresh capital to hire across engineering and go-to-market, expanding its clearinghouse to more than 50 segments spanning Home, Auto, Renters, Commercial, and Specialty insurance, while deepening direct relationships with carriers who increasingly use Axle as a governed gateway.
Axle was founded by Cameron Duncan, Armaan Sikand, and Nihar Parikh who have been friends for 15 years. They experienced the problem firsthand while building new products and services for automotive manufacturers, rental car companies, and mortgage lenders at Deloitte Digital and Cox Automotive.
“Everything the economy runs on — credit, payments, identity, income — has a clearinghouse in the middle. Insurance never has,” said Axle co-founders Cameron Duncan, Armaan Sikand, and Nihar Parikh. “We’re building it. Once insurance is standardized and programmable, it becomes far more valuable to the carriers who write it, the businesses that rely on it, and the hundreds of millions of consumers it protects.”
To get in touch with the Axle team, reach out at press@axle.insure. Visit Axle’s job board to view open roles. Follow Axle on LinkedIn.
About Axle
Axle is the AI-native clearinghouse for insurance. Our infrastructure and AI agents automate complex insurance workflows for third parties including verification, monitoring, and policy updates. We’ve helped Fortune 500 businesses like Rocket Mortgage, Avis, and Experian speed up workflows by 20x while recovering over $220M in losses. Axle was founded by Cameron Duncan, Armaan Sikand, and Nihar Parikh and is backed by Base10, Gradient, Y Combinator, and the early team of Plaid. Learn more at https://axle.insure.
About Base10 Partners
Founded by Adeyemi Ajao and TJ Nahigian, Base10 is a San Francisco-based venture capital fund investing in founders who believe purpose is key to profits and companies that are automating sectors of the Real Economy, including transportation, retail, logistics, and construction. Through its program, The Advancement Initiative, Base10 aims to donate 50% of profits to underfunded colleges and universities to support financial aid and other key initiatives. Portfolio companies include Notion, Figma, Nubank, Stripe, Motive, Chili Piper, and Popmenu. Connect via www.base10.vc.
- “How AI is reshaping the economics of insurance.” McKinsey, 23 July 2026 https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/financial-services/our-insights/how-ai-will-reshape-the-economics-of-insurance-a-ceos-guide-to-strategy#/
