Akinova

Akinova is a London-based, Bermuda-regulated electronic marketplace for trading (re)insurance risk and insurance-linked securities (ILS). It was founded in 2017 by Dr Henri Winand (CEO, previously CEO of Intelligent Energy Holdings PLC) and Dr Jean Michel Paul. Its goal is to build the first new regulated insurance marketplace since Lloyd's of London in 1871. That claim is based on Bermuda Monetary Authority (BMA) regulation, not on any UK institutional connection.

Regulatory status is the product. In January 2021 Akinova received the first Insurance Marketplace Provider licence issued by the BMA. The BMA created this licence category in 2019, specifically for venues like Akinova. The licence lets Akinova connect cedents (companies buying reinsurance), brokers, carriers and capital providers in one regulated place. It covers trading of insurance contract securities, collateral, cat bonds, notes and preference shares. Akinova is regulated as a marketplace — not as a broker and not as a carrier — so it does not compete with the brokers and carriers who use it. That neutral position is the main thing Akinova sells to participants.

What Akinova actually is vs. what the prompt describes. Many secondary sources call Akinova a "Lloyd's Lab" graduate or Lloyd's innovation alumnus. That is wrong. Artemis.bm reported that Akinova pitched for Lloyd's Lab Cohort 2 in 2019 and was not selected. Akinova's regulatory base is Bermuda: BMA sandbox licence 2019, full BMA Insurance Marketplace Provider licence January 2021. Anyone evaluating Akinova should ignore descriptions that call it Lloyd's-affiliated.

Funding and investors. Total disclosed funding is somewhere between ~$5.3m (Crunchbase, six rounds, 33 investors) and ~$12.8m (PitchBook). The last confirmed round was a ~$878k Series B led by FinTLV in July 2019. Named strategic investors include Hiscox (also the capacity provider on the platform's first trade), MS&AD Ventures (the venture arm of Japanese insurance holding company MS&AD), FJ Labs and FinTLV. No publicly indexed round has appeared since 2019 — a six-year gap that matters for a marketplace whose value depends on liquidity and deal flow.

Transaction traction. The one well-documented trade is a parametric cyber risk transfer on 23 December 2019: Hiscox structured it and provided capacity, Guy Carpenter brokered it, PCS acted as reporting agent, and an asset manager in financial services bought it to cover cyber-induced disruption to US power generation. A second parametric cloud outage placement for an Asian tech firm followed in 2020. After that, Akinova has not published placed limits, transacted premium or a named-cedent list. Tremor, by contrast, regularly disclosed ~$278m in cumulative premium and named its cedents.

Pivot toward MGA product. From 2023 to 2024 Akinova moved visibly from marketplace toward a managing general agent (MGA) model with two B2B products. A1Policy is a multi-year umbrella policy for Fortune 500 insureds, aimed at releasing capital. C1Policy is a structured-credit insurance product that protects credit-card acquirers against losses when airline or travel merchant clients go insolvent; it was shortlisted for the Axco Global Insurance Awards 2024. In September 2025 Insurance Insider reported Akinova was preparing an aggregate umbrella offering through a joint stock company co-owned by insureds and capital providers. These products are real, but they sit in the structured-credit MGA space, not the reinsurance exchange space Akinova originally targeted.

Positioning vs. Tremor and Ledger Investing. Tremor ran sealed-bid batch auctions for property-cat treaty placement, recorded ~$278m in premium, and was acquired by W. R. Berkley in 2023. Akinova runs bespoke bilateral and multilateral trades on a regulated venue and stays independent. Ledger Investing is a broker-dealer that packages US casualty portfolios into Cayman special-purpose vehicles. Akinova does not structure deals; it provides the regulated infrastructure on which cedents, brokers and capital providers trade cyber, parametric, ILS and other risk-transfer instruments. The ambition is a neutral, multi-participant regulated venue — a kind of digital Lloyd's. Disclosed transaction volume has not yet matched that ambition.

Analyst gap. No Gartner, Celent or Forrester coverage surfaced. Sources are Artemis.bm, Reinsurance News, Insurance Insider, Intelligent Insurer, Captive International and The Royal Gazette (Bermuda), plus Akinova's own announcements and blog.