Nettle raises $4.8M to fix commercial insurance’s 6-month inspection backlog
Tech Funding News Sofia Chesnokova ● Covered by 2 sources
Nettle raised $4.8M to speed up commercial insurance inspections. Its pitch: fix a six-month backlog before risk engineers start retiring.
Based on reporting by Tech Funding News, Sofia Chesnokova — read the original for the full story.
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Nettle has closed a $4.8 million seed round led by MTech, with the company saying the deal was oversubscribed. Project A Ventures, its lead pre-seed backer, put in more than expected to keep a bigger stake, and SVV, Portfolio Ventures, Ventures Together, plus several angels also joined. Including the earlier pre-seed money, Nettle says it has now raised $6.8 million.
The startup sits in an unusual place: headquartered in both London and New York, founded in 2024 by Jack Miller and Katya Kinane after their time together at QuantumBlack, McKinsey’s AI arm. Miller now runs the company as CEO. Kinane, formerly Katya Lait, had already built McKinsey’s first multi-agent generative AI product for finance, and she says Nettle is the third product she has built from scratch.
The company is aiming at a very old problem. It says commercial insurers can face inspection backlogs of up to six months, and it argues that 40% of risk engineers could retire by 2030, though it does not cite a source for that number. RSM has offered a lower estimate for London property risk engineers, saying about 10% may retire in the coming years.
Nettle’s software uses external data to flag possible risks before an engineer reaches a site, then helps with the inspection by processing images, video, audio, and documents gathered on the visit. Engineers still record photos and voice notes, and the system turns that into a risk report. The platform was shown during Guidewire’s Insurtech Vanguards program in July 2025, and Nettle says it can make inspections five times faster, although a pilot with Allianz Türkiye in April 2026 found speeds up to three times faster.
The customer list already includes Allianz and Brotherhood Mutual, and the product is being opened up to agents and policyholders so people without risk-engineering experience can gather data. The fresh cash is for expansion in the US and Europe, plus more engineers and sales staff. Kinane also says the company wants to reach 12 full-time employees, alongside dedicated accounting and finance teams.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the sort of AI pitch insurers should be forced to earn, not just demo. Backlogs are real, but so is the industry’s talent for buying software first and deciding whether it works later. If Nettle can survive the sales cycle and prove its pilot numbers outside the lab, that’s useful; if not, it’s just another very polished promise in a sector that loves them.
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