Insurers Are Losing Millions Due to Risk Engineering Delays – nettle Raises £1.45M to Fix It with AI

By harnessing cutting-edge AI technology, nettle is vastly accelerating the risk assessment process in commercial insurance, and enabling knowledge transfer to future generations

LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM. TUESDAY 8TH APRIL 2025. 8AM GMT.  

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 $1M+ 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.

Co-founders Jack Miller, left, and Katya Lait, right, launched nettle to modernise risk engineering

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 >$200k) 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.

Jack Miller, nettle co-founder and CEO, comments:

"AI has moved beyond hype - it's delivering incredible efficiencies and transforming how companies use unstructured data at scale. Our mission is clear: modernise risk assessment. Insurers who embrace AI will win."

Malin Posern, Partner at Project A, adds:

"nettle is uniquely positioned at the intersection of technology and risk assessment. With a team that has a proven track record of building AI solutions for the industry, nettle is set to help insurers understand and maintain in-depth risk profiles in an automated way and unlock efficiencies across the insurance value chain. We are excited to partner with Jack, Katya, and the team as they seize this significant opportunity."

About nettle

nettle is an AI-powered platform that revolutionises commercial insurance by streamlining risk assessment. Combining remote risk identification, bespoke inspection guides, mobile evidence analysis, and instant report generation, nettle transforms a week-long process into a one-click solution. By automating manual tasks, it allows engineers to complete 5x more inspections, enabling insurers to underwrite more business, faster, and with greater precision. Additionally, nettle extracts valuable insights from historical reports, bridging the industry’s expertise gap.

About Project A

Project A is one of the leading early-stage tech investors in Europe with offices in Berlin and London. In addition to $1bn assets under management, Project A commands the largest VC platform team in Europe: 100 functional experts exclusively support the portfolio companies in key areas of growth such as recruiting, GTM, and data engineering. The venture capital firm was founded in 2012 and has backed more than 120 startups. The portfolio includes companies such as Trade Republic, Black Semiconductor, Quantum Systems and sennder.