Artificial Labs

Artificial Labs is a London insurtech founded in 2013 by David King and Johnny Bridges. Its platform digitises the specialty placement workflow — submission ingestion, risk data capture, algorithmic triage, quote/bind/issue, and portfolio-level underwriting appetite — for Lloyd's syndicates, London carriers, MGAs, and specialty brokers.

Business footprint. Artificial closed a $45M Series B in February 2026 led by CommerzVentures, with Move Capital Fund I joining alongside existing investors Augmentum Fintech, 6 Degrees Capital, FOM, and TrueSight Ventures. Prior rounds include a £9.5m Series A in June 2022 (led by Force Over Mass Capital) and an £8m Series A follow-on led by Augmentum Fintech in February 2024. Cumulative funding is approximately $90M. The Series B announcement flagged 2026 US market entry and a doubling of headcount over the following 12 months.

Public carrier deployments. Chaucer (UK specialty) signed in March 2020 for a digitised quote/bind/issue platform for high-volume specialty products. Apollo Syndicate 1969 launched a Smart Follow collaboration with Artificial in August 2023, piloted on Marine Hull, and renewed the partnership in November 2024. Convex, AXIS, and Aon are named as partners in Artificial's 2022 Series A announcement. In July 2025, Augmented UW Ltd — a new Lloyd's follow-capacity MGA — launched on Artificial's platform as its core technology stack.

What it does. The platform sits at the underwriting-workstation layer. It ingests broker submissions (emails, slips, schedules), structures the risk data, applies portfolio rules to accept/refer/decline, and for participating carriers operates as the algorithmic engine behind smart-follow syndicates. Apollo's Smart Follow class specifically uses Artificial to write algorithmic follow lines at scale on classes like Marine Hull.

AgLabs. In February 2026, Artificial launched AgLabs, an agentic-AI division targeting the pre-bind interaction between broker and underwriter agents. Its own research found that 88% of London-market broker submissions reach underwriters without being fully decision-ready — a figure Artificial uses to scope the problem its platform addresses.

Analyst gap. Coverage is concentrated in London-market trade press (Insurance Insider, Insurance Times, Reinsurance News, InsurTech Digital). No Gartner, Celent, or Forrester leader-quadrant placement for specialty underwriting platforms has been published as of the April 2026 verification date.

What it does not do. Artificial is not a claims platform, not a policy-admin system of record, and not a rating engine for personal lines. Its focus is the commercial/specialty submission-to-bind workflow and the portfolio-level underwriting decisioning that sits behind it. US deployments are not yet publicly documented.