For decades, companies have relied on commercial insurers to transfer the financial risks associated with their operations. But an increasing number are choosing to retain more of those risks themselves through insurance subsidiaries known as captives.
Now, artificial intelligence is moving into one of the most specialized parts of that process: actuarial work.
Huscarl, a startup building what it describes as the first autonomous AI actuary for corporations and their insurance captives, announced today that it has raised $5.6 million in seed funding led by FRST, with participation from Y Combinator and other Silicon Valley investors.
The company will use the funding to expand in the US and deepen the capabilities of its AI actuaries. Its platform automates the ingestion of large volumes of unstructured data, generates bespoke risk models for emerging or unusual risks, and orchestrates actuarial workflows from end to end.
Every study is reviewed and signed by a credentialed human actuary.
The funding comes as corporate self-insurance continues to expand, giving Huscarl a growing market in which to deploy its technology.
According to Marsh’s 2026 Captive Solutions Benchmarking Report, captives managed by the broker generated $79.1 billion in gross written premiums in 2025, up from approximately $77 billion a year earlier.
Fortune 500 companies using captives also increased their captive premium volume by 9%, while Marsh recorded 118 new captive formations in 2025, compared with 92 in 2024.
The growth is notable because it came as commercial insurance rates declined in several major lines, suggesting that companies are increasingly viewing captives as a long-term risk-financing strategy rather than simply a response to expensive insurance.
When companies become their own insurers
A captive is an insurance company established and controlled by a parent organization to cover some of its own risks.
Instead of transferring every exposure to a commercial insurer, a company can retain selected risks within its captive and use traditional insurance or reinsurance for the layers it does not want to keep.
The model can give companies greater control over pricing, coverage and claims while allowing them to retain underwriting profits and build capital within the captive.
But operating an insurance company requires specialized actuarial work.
Companies need to estimate future losses, calculate reserves, determine premiums, assess capital requirements and model risks for which historical data may be limited.
That is the problem Huscarl is trying to address.
Its platform can process large volumes of unstructured information and generate customized risk models for emerging and unusual risks, while orchestrating the actuarial workflow required to produce the final studies.
The company is not removing human actuaries from the process.
Every study is reviewed and signed by a credentialed human actuary, according to Huscarl.
A growing market for retained risk
Captives are also being used to manage increasingly complex risks.
Aon’s research on captives and cyber risk found that 22% of respondents to its 2025 Global Risk Management Survey had a captive or protected cell company, while another 4.1% planned to establish one within three years.
Aon also found that nearly a quarter of respondents with captives were using them to underwrite cyber risk, compared with just 1% in 2014.
Cyber is only one example.
Captive structures can allow companies to retain risks involving areas such as employee benefits, supply chains, climate exposure and other risks where traditional insurance may not provide the coverage, pricing or capacity they want.
WTW’s 2026 Insurance Marketplace Realities report also points to continued interest in captives as companies look for greater control over risk financing. The consultancy reported that new captive formations in the US remained strong during the first half of 2025, while established captives continued using their capital to address pricing and capacity challenges across different lines of business.
That creates a larger market not only for captive insurance companies themselves, but also for the infrastructure required to operate them.
And actuarial work is a critical part of that infrastructure.
From cyber insurance to AI actuaries
Huscarl’s founding team comes from the insurance technology world, with experience developing products around risks that traditional insurers have struggled to model.
CEO Alexandre Musy and CTO Paulien Jeunesse previously worked together at Descartes Underwriting, where they created what Huscarl describes as the world’s first cyber parametric insurance product for corporations.
Musy scaled the product commercially across Europe, while Jeunesse, an actuary and AI scientist, built the underlying model with a fresh approach to cyber claims severity.
The pair is now applying that experience to another part of the insurance value chain.
Huscarl’s services span actuarial work for self-insurance, including one-off studies and ongoing Appointed Actuary services for insurance captives. The company also provides AI-powered outsourced underwriting for group captives and Risk Retention Groups.
The startup has already been trusted by a Risk Retention Group and a single-parent captive for a company with more than $2 billion in revenue.
It is now looking to expand its network of partner captive managers and brokers.
“Our goal is clear: to enable ambitious corporate risk managers to become their own company’s Chief Underwriting Officer. We’re working towards a future where self-insurance becomes the default, and commercial insurance becomes the exception. Thanks to this funding round, we’re significantly closer to achieving that.”
Alexandre Musy, CEO at Huscarl.
The bet on the corporate underwriter
Huscarl’s ambition goes beyond making actuarial work faster.
The company wants to give corporate risk managers the tools to take greater control over how their organizations understand, price and retain risk.
That could eventually turn the corporate risk manager into something closer to an underwriter — deciding which exposures to retain, how much capital to allocate to them and when to transfer risk to the traditional insurance market.
FRST co-founder and partner Bruno Raillard sees that shift as part of a broader change in corporate risk management.
“The growth of self-insurance has been a major trend of the last ten years, to a point where the world’s largest corporations now self-insure close to 100% of their risks. On the other side of the spectrum, companies as small as $10 million in revenue are starting to consider it as an alternative to traditional insurance. The team at Huscarl is building the critical infrastructure for this market,” said Bruno Raillard, co-founder and partner at FRST.
For Huscarl, the opportunity is therefore not simply to automate spreadsheets or make actuarial calculations faster.
It is to build infrastructure for companies that want to behave more like insurance companies themselves.
That thesis is already visible among the largest corporations, while smaller companies are beginning to explore whether self-insurance can make economic sense for them.
Huscarl’s platform is designed to sit between those companies and the specialized actuarial work required to make that strategy possible.
The company’s founding experience in cyber insurance also gives it a starting point in modeling risks that can be difficult to price using traditional historical data.
The $5.6 million seed round now gives Huscarl capital to take that model into the US market.
And the company’s long-term goal is clear.
“We’re working towards a future where self-insurance becomes the default, and commercial insurance becomes the exception,” said Musy.
As corporations take greater control over the risks they retain, Huscarl is betting that the next piece of insurance infrastructure to change will be the actuary itself.
Disclosure: This article mentions a client of an Espacio portfolio company.
