- FRANK obtained €2.9 million in financing from Armilar and Start Ventures.
- The company’s AI operator handles portal and administrative tasks for more than 350 brokerages.
- António Castro, who previously worked at Lovys, intends to expand the company into international markets in 2027.
The Portuguese insurtech company FRANK has secured €2.9 million in funding from Armilar and Start Ventures, who are based in Lisbon. The money raised will be used to expand its AI assistant, which can log in to insurer portals, complete forms, and track documents for insurance brokers.
The company was founded in December 2024, and its flagship product is the AI Operator. When brokers have to carry out tasks like processing quotes, following up on claims, or updating a client’s address, they are usually required to handle a large number of emails and log in to various insurer portals, each with its own login and forms.
“Most brokers spend 80% of their time on back-office work rather than spending time with their clients. It is necessary to free brokers from carrying out operational tasks so that they can concentrate on risk advice and their clients, promote greater insurance literacy among consumers, and help to protect people more effectively,” says António Castro, its co-founder and chief executive officer, to Tech Funding News.
The product comes at a time when the industry is experiencing difficulties. In June 2026, Waniwani raised $8 million in a seed funding round, with Seedcamp as the lead investor, to enable consumers to purchase insurance via ChatGPT applications.
On February 9, 2026, the shares of broker WTW fell by 13%. According to Bank of America, $15 billion in insurance commissions could be at risk from AI, particularly for low-complexity work performed by US independent agents. FRANK aims to assist brokers dealing with these changes.
The CFO who left a successful insurer to build tools for brokers
In his career, Castro was chief financial officer at Lovys, an online insurer based in Paris which raised €17 million in its Series A round in 2021, before venturing into the startup world with Ricardo Vallejo and Alexandre Silva.
The timing is the main motivation, as he says. “AI is changing tremendously. If you don’t enter the situation at the right time, then you’ll regret not having done so later on,” Castro states.
Inês de Macedo Santos, principal at Armilar, noted: “Insurance brokers spend much of their day on manual back-office processes, instead of focusing on protecting their clients better. That’s the problem FRANK was built to solve.”
The team expanded rapidly from 10 to 20 members, all of whom have worked at firms such as Lovys, JPMorgan, McKinsey, SAP, Accenture, FiveAI, Indie Campers, and Bolt, and each has more than 10 years’ experience in both insurance and technology.
A virtual employee that gets things done
FRANK’s AI Operator carries out various tasks on different brokerage systems and portals by connecting to services such as email and WhatsApp, reading the documents, determining the appropriate procedure, identifying any missing data for the brokers, logging into the relevant portals, entering the information, and then providing results like commercial quotes or claim statuses. At any time, brokers can review the work performed by the AI Operator.
“It is entirely focused on insurance distribution, which means that it is linked to the ERPs that broker agents use. It is familiar with the terminology and understands what a claim and a premium mean with regard to one carrier as opposed to another,” Castro says, referencing to enterprise resource planning software, which is the back-office system that brokers use.
Speaking about competition, Castro states that most AI startups in the field develop assistants which provide answers to questions about documents and policy guarantees. Regarding other developments in the area of AI in insurance, FurtherAI raised $25 million in its Series A round in October 2025, with a16z as the lead investor, and London-based Artificial Labs closed a $45 million Series B round in February 2026, with CommerzVentures as the lead investor.
The company now has more than 350 agencies and brokerages and over 1,500 users, having been in the market for less than a year. On average, each broker saves about 10 administrative hours per week, and the system performs 70,000 back-office tasks each month.
Why Armilar and Start Ventures invested
Nuno Marques Afonso, an associate at Start Ventures, stated: “We invested in FRANK before it had a single client. Since then, we’ve watched one of the most conservative sectors we know adopt it at a pace we rarely see in insurtech. New brokers are emerging that are built from day one with artificial intelligence at the center of their operations, with quotes, claims and paperwork handled by machines from the outset. FRANK lets any established broker work the same way, without having to start from scratch.”
Macedo Santos added, “We’ve known António since his time as CFO at Lovys, a French insurtech that sells insurance 100% online and uses technology to reach clients directly. After that experience, António wanted to do the opposite: put technology at the service of brokers, to make them more efficient and more digital.”
The money will be allocated to three main areas: attracting new clients, conducting research and development, and expanding internationally.
Portugal, with 10.7 million people and 8 unicorns, is a small home market. FRANK aims to become a “Portuguese champion” abroad after establishing itself locally. Castro is cautious about expanding too soon: “If you spend on go-to-market in the US or elsewhere and you’re not prepared, you’re just wasting money.”
