- Nettle has raised $4.8 million in seed financing, with MTech as the lead investor. Project A also invested more than expected.
- According to Katya Kinane, the company’s website is one of its best sales tools.
- Nettle believes that 40% of risk engineers could be retired by 2030, although it does not give a source for this figure.
Nettle, a company headquartered in both London and New York, announced it had raised a $4.8 million seed round, with the funds oversubscribed. MTech led the round, and Project A Ventures, which had been the leading investor in the pre-seed round, increased its investment to maintain a larger share.
Other investors in the round included SVV (Sure Valley Ventures), Portfolio Ventures, Ventures Together, and several angel investors. Together with the money raised in the pre-seed round, Nettle has raised a total of $6.8 million.
From QuantumBlack to a retirement cliff
Jack Miller and Katya Kinane founded Nettle in 2024 after working together at QuantumBlack, McKinsey’s AI division. As reported by Tech Funding News in April 2025, Miller, now CEO, expanded the AI insurance tools used by over 100 insurers.
Kinane, formerly known as Katya Lait, led the development of McKinsey’s first multi-agent generative AI product for the finance sector. According to Crunchbase, she attended both Trinity College Dublin and the University of Edinburgh.
In a conversation with TFN, she speaks of the early stages of her career, when she got involved with student-run startups and met founders and venture capitalists in Dublin before shifting her focus to fintech in London. She describes meeting Jack Miller at McKinsey as being like meeting a “kindred soul.”
Nettle is the third product she has developed from the ground up, and she says that, up to now, insurance has perhaps lagged behind some other sectors in the financial industry, and that she thinks it is a really exciting time to be working in this area.
Nettle is addressing a staffing issue in the insurance sector. The company says commercial insurers can have inspection backlogs of up to six months and estimates that 40% of risk engineers could retire by 2030, although it does not provide sources. RSM, on the other hand, gives a lower figure, claiming that about 10% of property risk engineers in London might retire in the coming years.
What the platform does, and what is still unproven
Using external data, Nettle’s software can identify potential risks before an engineer visits a site, and it assists with the inspection by analysing images, video, audio, and documents gathered during the visit. Engineers record their observations using photos and voice notes, and the system then prepares the risk report.
This process was demonstrated when Nettle joined Guidewire’s Insurtech Vanguards program in July 2025. The platform is suitable for property, liability, construction, and workers’ compensation insurance.
According to Kinane, the company is now concerned with more than just risk assessment. “The third thing that insurers are really interested in is prevention and also customer retention,” she says. She goes on to say, “Underwriters and brokers have kind of missed the SaaS wave and have jumped straight to AI,” referring to software as a service.
Nettle has Allianz and Brotherhood Mutual among its customers. The company says its platform enables insurers to complete inspections five times faster, although a pilot with Allianz Türkiye in April 2026 found inspections were up to three times faster.
The funds will help Nettle expand its operations in the United States and Europe and hire more engineers and sales personnel. Kinane stated that the company aims to have 12 full-time employees, together with dedicated accounting and finance teams.
Nettle is also making its product available to agents and policyholders so individuals without experience in risk engineering can gather the data. “Our aim has always been to prevent losses, but insurers can only act on the risks that they understand; too often that understanding is restricted by the capabilities of their teams, and that is the ceiling we are removing,” said Miller.
Many other companies are also tackling the same issues. In September 2026, Beagle Labs, based in New York, secured $4.1 million in pre-seed financing and uses artificial intelligence alongside over 7,000 field inspectors. Fortune states that Honeycomb raised $40 million for an underwriting model which doesn’t involve physical inspections.
Nettle instead supplies software to insurers who retain their own engineers. Mordor Intelligence believes the AI sector in the insurance industry will be worth $26.3 billion by 2026. TFN has likewise covered Artificial Labs, FRANK, and Alan.
Why an insurance specialist led the round
MTech was founded in 2018 by Kevin and Brian McLoughlin and focuses its investments on early-stage companies that apply AI to insurance and financial services.
“We are very impressed by Nettle’s achievements so far, and by the considerable experience the founders have in a sector of insurance that is usually ignored by start-ups,” said Kevin McLoughlin, founder and managing partner at MTech.
Nettle’s long-term success will depend on whether insurers continue to make payments after the pilot schemes end. Kinane acknowledges that the sales process for insurance products is lengthy and that there is currently no data on how well agent-led and policyholder-led inspections perform when there is a major loss.
Only future contracts will determine whether the retirement gap is as large as Nettle forecasts.
