Nigerian-Spanish investor Adeyemi Ajao backs a startup clearing $100 billion in insurance a year

Base10 Partners, the San Francisco venture firm co-founded by the Nigerian-Spanish investor Adeyemi Ajao, has led a $17.5 million Series A round in Axle, a company that verifies insurance policies for lenders, car dealers and rental firms.

Axle handles more than $100 billion in insurance coverage a year for over 4,000 customers, among them Rocket Mortgage, Avis, Experian and Sonic Automotive. The company has tripled the number of workflows it automates in the past six months.

Ajao said insurance remains one of the most manual industries in the economy despite sitting underneath vehicle purchases, mortgages and rentals.

"In 2026, no one should be faxing PDFs or sitting on hold to confirm a policy," he said. "The Axle team built the rails that make insurance programmable, and we believe a generation of products will be built on top of them."

Y Combinator, Gradient and Stage 2 Capital joined the round, alongside the founders of Cover Genius. Members of the early team at Plaid, the financial data company, were already on the register.

The problem Axle addresses is administrative rather than technological. Businesses that depend on insurance still verify, update and monitor policies by telephone, fax and manual document handling. A single mortgage loan can require more than ten separate interactions with an insurer over a year. Insurers themselves run multiple policy systems and hold much of their information in unstructured documents, which leaves no single place to ask whether a policy is current.

Axle connects to those systems, routes each request to the right source and standardises the returned data through a single interface. The platform automates policy verification, coverage checks, updates and monitoring for changes. The company says the approach has made insurance-related processes 20 times faster and helped customers recover hundreds of millions of dollars in losses.

Jordan Bannantine, head of risk management at the rental company SIXT, described what the alternative looked like. Verifying a renter's insurance previously meant either absorbing the risk or holding the customer at the counter while staff checked, he said, and the system has helped SIXT recover millions of dollars a year that it used to write off.

Axle will spend the money on engineering and sales staff and on extending the service into more than 50 segments across home, auto, renters, commercial and specialty insurance. The company also intends to build direct relationships with insurance carriers, which it says are increasingly treating the platform as a controlled gateway for their own data.

Cameron Duncan, Armaan Sikand and Nihar Parikh founded Axle after knowing each other for 15 years. All three previously worked on products for car manufacturers, rental companies and mortgage lenders at Deloitte Digital and Cox Automotive. They describe the aim as building for insurance the kind of standardised clearinghouse that already exists in credit, payments and identity verification.

The investment sits directly on the thesis Ajao has run since 2018. Base10 was founded that year with TJ Nahigian on the argument that the largest returns from automation would come not from consumer applications or developer tools but from digitising the unglamorous sectors that carry the economy: logistics, financial services, healthcare, transportation and real estate.

Limited partners were unconvinced at first. Ajao has said the firm originally described itself as focused on applied artificial intelligence for the real economy and had to relabel the strategy as automation because investors told him applied AI was too narrow a category. He now points to portfolio companies moving from zero to tens of millions of dollars in revenue inside 12 months.

The firm has grown accordingly. Base10 closed $850 million across two funds in June, taking assets under management to $2.6 billion, with money from endowments, pension funds and sovereign wealth funds. Its 2018 debut fund of $137 million was the largest ever raised by a Black-led venture firm, and Base10 later became the first to pass $1 billion in assets. Earlier investments include Nubank, Figma, Instacart, Rappi and Aurora Solar.

Ajao built the track record that made the fund possible outside the United States. Born to a Nigerian father and a Spanish mother, he spent his first years in Lagos before the family moved to Italy and then to southern Spain. He taught himself to code in secondary school and co-founded Tuenti, a social network for Spanish students, in 2005 while studying in Madrid. Telefónica bought it five years later.

He went to Stanford's business school, founded Identified and sold it to Workday, then rose to vice president of technology product strategy there and helped launch Workday Ventures. He was also a founding investor in Cabify and Jobandtalent.

Base10 commits half its gains from one of its funds to scholarships for underrepresented students and runs an initiative directing returns to endowments at historically Black colleges and universities.