Insurance giants are facing a critical shortage of risk engineers – 40% are set to retire in the next five years, creating industry-wide backlogs, lost business, and rising costs. Today, risk engineers spend 90% of their time buried in paperwork instead of actually assessing risk. This inefficiency is already leading to six-month delays for critical insurance inspections, turning away billions in potential business.
To tackle this crisis, nettle, an AI-powered risk assessment platform, has raised £1.45m in pre-seed funding led by Project A, alongside top angel investors from major insurers, startups, and insurance & AI leaders. With this funding, nettle is scaling out the core engineering team and bolstering a platform already cutting risk engineering turnaround times for early partners.
The global primary commercial P&C insurance market is worth £750 billion annually, and an estimated £19 billion is spent on risk engineering, nettle is positioning itself to capture a significant portion of this by solving an urgent pain point for insurers.
The London-based company was founded in 2024 by Jack Miller (CEO), former Engagement Manager at McKinsey & Company and Principal Product Manager at QuantumBlack, where he scaled a suite of 20 AI insurance products to £800,000+ ARR and deployed with 100+ insurers globally, and Katya Lait (CTO) former Senior Engineer at QuantumBlack, where she built McKinsey's first multi-agent GenAI product, piloted with 4+ major banking clients.
Taking the sting out of risk engineering
Six-month inspection backlogs are crippling insurers, forcing them to reject business and stunting growth. With veteran engineers retiring, decades of expertise is vanishing, and each new hire takes 2 years (and over £160,000) to train. The system is broken - but nettle is the solution.
• AI-powered remote risk identification – Assess and flag potential risks using data and AI models before an engineer even steps on-site, speeding up the entire process.
• Bespoke inspection guides – Customised to each project for maximum efficiency.
• Mobile evidence analysis – Analyse images, audio recordings, documents and data identified on-site directly via a mobile app.
• Instant report generation – A process that once took a week now happens in seconds.
• 5x more inspections – Automation frees engineers to complete five times as many inspections, driving faster, more accurate underwriting.
• Unlocking lost expertise – nettle enables insurers to mine 50+ years of unused historical reports and extract insights to guide new hires, bridging the knowledge gap.
A leading insurer has already partnered with nettle to deploy a proof of concept, demonstrating how AI can eliminate risk assessment backlogs and enable 2x underwriting growth.
