Akinova

Akinova is a London-headquartered, Bermuda-regulated electronic marketplace for the transfer and trading of (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 stated ambition is to build the first new regulated insurance marketplace since Lloyd's of London was chartered in 1871 — a claim grounded specifically in Bermuda Monetary Authority (BMA) regulatory structure rather than in UK institutional lineage.

Regulatory status is the product. In January 2021 Akinova received the first Insurance Marketplace Provider licence issued by the BMA, a regulatory category the authority created in 2019 specifically to accommodate Akinova-style venues. The licence permits Akinova to facilitate risk trading and transfer across cedents, brokers, carriers and capital providers in a fully regulated environment, including trading of insurance contract securities, collateral, cat bonds, notes and preference shares ancillary to insurance business. The venue is deliberately neutral: regulated as a marketplace but neither as a broker nor as a carrier, so it does not compete with the brokers and carriers transacting on it. That neutrality is the structural differentiator Akinova markets to ecosystem participants.

What Akinova actually is vs. what the prompt describes. A note on positioning. Akinova is frequently described in secondary sources as a "Lloyd's innovation labs alumnus" or "Lloyd's Lab" graduate. This is not accurate. Artemis.bm explicitly reported that Akinova pitched for Lloyd's Lab Cohort 2 in 2019 and was not selected. Akinova's actual regulatory home and institutional lineage is Bermuda — BMA sandbox licence 2019, BMA full Insurance Marketplace Provider licence January 2021 — not Lloyd's. A reader evaluating Akinova should discount any pitch deck describing it as Lloyd's-affiliated.

Funding and investors. Publicly disclosed cumulative funding sits between ~$5.3m (Crunchbase, across six rounds and 33 investors) and ~$12.8m (PitchBook). The most recent confirmed round is a ~$878k Series B led by FinTLV in July 2019. Named strategic investors include Hiscox (which became a named cedent on the platform's first trade), MS&AD Ventures (venture arm of the Japanese insurance holding company), FJ Labs and FinTLV. The six-year gap since the last publicly indexed round, for a marketplace whose value depends on liquidity and network effects, is worth flagging.

Transaction traction. Akinova's canonical reference transaction is the first parametric cyber risk transfer executed on the platform on 23 December 2019: Hiscox structured and provided capacity, Guy Carpenter brokered, PCS acted as reporting agent, and the buyer was disclosed (after the fact) as an asset manager in financial services covering cyber-induced disruption to US power generation assets. A second parametric cloud outage placement for an Asian tech firm followed in 2020. Beyond these bilateral trades the platform has not published ongoing placed limit, transacted premium or named-cedent counts, which contrasts sharply with Tremor's regular disclosure of $278m cumulative premium and named cedents.

Pivot toward MGA product. Between 2023 and 2024 Akinova's externally visible centre of gravity shifted from pure marketplace toward a "regulated MGA" posture with two proprietary B2B products: the A1Policy (a multi-year umbrella policy for Fortune 500 insureds, designed to unlock capital relief) and the C1Policy (a structured-credit insurance product covering credit-card acquirers against the insolvency risk of airline and travel merchant clients; shortlisted for the Axco Global Insurance Awards 2024). In September 2025 Insurance Insider reported Akinova was preparing an aggregate umbrella offering via a joint stock company co-owned by insureds and capital providers. These are real products, but they compete with structured-credit specialty MGAs and captive-style vehicles, not with reinsurance placement brokers — a different market than the exchange/auction thesis of 2019.

Positioning vs. Tremor and Ledger Investing. Akinova sits between the two. Unlike Tremor (which ran sealed-bid batch auctions for property-cat treaty placement, transacted ~$278m premium, and was acquired by W. R. Berkley in 2023), Akinova operates as a regulated venue for bilateral and multilateral bespoke risk-transfer trades rather than as a programmatic auction — and it remains independent. Unlike Ledger Investing (a broker-dealer and ILS structurer wrapping US casualty portfolios into Cayman SPCs), Akinova does not structure the deals: it provides the regulated rails on which cedents, brokers and capital providers transact cyber, parametric, ILS and other risk-transfer instruments. The closest operational analogue is the ambition of "a digital Lloyd's" — a neutral, regulated, multi-participant venue — and the honest evaluation is that this ambition has outrun disclosed transaction volume.

Analyst gap. No Gartner, Celent or Forrester coverage surfaced. Sourcing is Artemis.bm (gold-standard ILS trade), Reinsurance News, Insurance Insider, Intelligent Insurer, Captive International and The Royal Gazette (Bermuda), plus Akinova's own announcements and passle blog.