Agile raises seed capital for D&F start-up to work with ILS capacity

Agile Risk Advisory, the specialist direct & facultative (D&F) property risk underwriting  start-up for the world’s top two thousand global companies and which wants to leverage ILS investors as supporting capacity, has secured seed funding from an established MGA backer.

Agile Risk Advisory has secured its seed capital funding from Avantis, a Guernsey based insurance broking and underwriting agency firm that uses its resources to support and assist new MGA launches.

Agile aims to offer both risk transfer and advisory services, with broking, underwriting and actuarial capabilities and targets the direct and facultative property space, where large limit property programs are insured.

The founders of Agile Risk Advisory are James Poole, an ex-broker who worked at Price Forbes and Arthur J Gallagher & Co., and D&F market underwriter Richard Foster who was most recently the Head of Global Property at Brit Insurance.

Structured as an MGA and now supported by Avantis, Agile Risk Partners has the resources and financing required to begin underwriting and will be working to secure capacity lines to support the large property contracts it expects to underwrite.

As we previously reported, Agile will work closely with U.S. based insurtech startup OnRisk, who will provide them with a tool for structuring risk-transfer contracts where the coverage can be interrogated with comparative data feeds including probable maximum loss (PML), time series, claims experience and stochastic modelling, the company said.

Agile expects to use the technology from OnRisk to structure insurance-linked security (ILS) arrangements for direct & facultative risk, as well as to assist re/insurer clients in improving their underwriting profitability, exposure management at enterprise-level, and to create new risk-free revenue streams through the monetisation of their data.

Co-founder James Poole said the fundraising had taken longer than hoped for due to the timing colliding with the Lloyd’s performance reviews and renewals, but he said, “The team has been really pleased with the strong valuations we’re getting from VC teams.”

Richard Foster, the other co-founder, added, “This is proof that people are interested in new ways of doing things, and it’s proof of interest in a new era of over-the-counter dealing.”

Agile Risk Advisory will be headquartered in London close to the Lloyd’s market and will work closely with its backer Avantis and other market players in Guernsey as it ramps up towards an underwriting launch.

The start-up believes that it could write as many as 200 large D&F property risks per year, backed by a combination of traditional and ILS capital.

For ILS markets that work with the company, this could provide a valuable source of diversifying global property risks.