We’ve almost reached the end of 2019.

The past 12 months have flown by in a rush of deals, product launches and new hires - not to mention three babies, three puppies and one wedding! It’s been an exciting time for the Artificial team personally and professionally.

Co-founder and CCO David King reflects on a great year for the company.

What a year it’s been for Artificial. It’s surpassed all of our expectations; we knew there were exciting things ahead, but the drive and commitment of our growing team has lead to successful product launches, significant new partnerships and increased revenue.

The whole team have worked tirelessly to improve our offerings and deliver new products to our clients. We have made excellent advances in our use of Machine Learning and Data Science, and we have developed new exciting applications that have the potential to revolutionise our sector.

I want to thank everyone in the Artificial family for their work this year. 2020 is only going to get better as we plan to open a new office, announce new partnerships and reach new markets. Happy New Year!

So what exactly did we get up to?

1. We raised over £5m in investment 💷

In April, we announced that we had closed our round of £4.2m seed funding. The co-investment between Alma Mundi InsurTech Fund, Force Over Mass and other investors enabled us to expand our engineering team, develop our business opportunities overseas and work on exciting new features for our platform, artificialOS. Later in the year, we secured a further £1.1m, leading the way for further growth and development.

2. We signed new partnerships 🤝

In Q2 we were delighted to announce our partnership with Capita Scaling Partner (CSP), the corporate venturing arm of Capita Plc who are committed to securing growth and expansion for early stage disruptive companies.

Our relationship with CSP this year has given us the opportunity to grow rapidly with access to valuable business tools such as scalable services, new consumer channels and a global network of retailers and insurers. It has also given us the credibility to stand out and become an insurance market leader. In turn, we enhance Capita’s insurance offering and have brought innovation to their clients and partners.

This year we also became partners with MarketMinds and Instech London, as well as becoming founding members of Insurtech UK. Overall it’s been a great year for networking and for meeting other companies who are working to improve insurance.

3. We hired more great talent 👩‍💼

We really focused on expanding our amazing team this year. We want to deliver the best product to our clients and we know that to do that you need the best people.

Several newcomers joined our talented main office in London: Alexis Renaudin as Head of Data Science, Ollie Fox in Business Development, Katalin Konczol as Technical Support Analyst, James Haydon as Senior Product Engineer and Harsit Patel as Senior Machine Learning Engineer.

In Warsaw, we grew our fantastic engineering team further with Piotr Kieszczynski as Senior Devops Engineer and Dominik Ajlert as Front-end Engineer.

Our Content and Design team came into its own with two new hires - Anna Burge as Head of Content and Marketing and Lauren Landes as Marketing Designer.

We also believe in nurturing the newest generation of talented graduates, so we worked closely with Imperial College London throughout the year (including at their DoCSoc Sponsor’s Exhibition). Their students have worked with us for several years on the data and ML teams and this summer we were joined by Engineering Intern Emma Tye and Machine Learning intern Andy Li.

4. We launched the Beta Community 📩

In conjunction with our successful workshop and presentation at the Insurance 3.0 conference in October, we launched our exciting beta program, the Artificial Beta Community.

This project, spearheaded by our co-founder and CPO Johnny Bridges, is intended as a platform for like-minded members of the insurance space to share ideas and frustrations about how insurance functions in this changing technological landscape. Membership has been enthusiastic and we can’t wait to grow the community next year!

5. Our platform continued to grow rapidly 📈

The team’s hard work continued to pay off this year as we had several new launches of our product lines and are fast-approaching 1,000,000 policies on our platform! We are now working on over 16 product lines with more being added all the time.

6. We travelled the world 🌏

As part of our efforts to expand and discover more about the global insurance market, we met over 20 brokers and underwriters at events and meetings across Dubai and Singapore throughout the year. The Artificial platform was also showcased across Europe during events in London, Rome, Cologne and Ghent.

These efforts have provided our commercial team with great insights into how the insurance landscape is changing and look set to help us develop in the new year.

7. Our family grew! 👨‍👨‍👧‍👦

To say the Artificial team has had an eventful year would be an understatement. Three babies were born (yes, three) in the space of five weeks - and that’s just in the London office!

CCO David and wife Emily welcomed baby George in June; CEO Damian and Charlotte were joined by baby Ophelia in July, and a mere two days after, CPO Johnny and Hannah announced the birth of baby Mia! (All adorable, we have no favourites)

We also had an influx of puppies into the Artificial team: CPO Johnny and his family were joined by Poppy in March, Head of Design Dave and Anna from the Content team welcomed Daisy in September, and then Head of Delivery Dips began fostering Hearing Dog puppy Fletcher in October!

Our Warsaw team then had more celebrations in October as Back-end Engineer Piotr Luczko and his lovely wife Paulina got married! 🎉

Plenty of congratulations (and puppy pics) are in order.

What’s next?

Who knows what will happen in 2020? When Artificial was born in 2013, it would have been impossible to predict where we are now. Ever since the company’s inception, our shared values - the best people working hard to deliver real solutions to our clients - have led us to here, our most successful year yet.

But 2020 is a new year, a new decade, and a new set of opportunities. We have several major new deals to be announced in the new year (sorry, no clues just yet) - so keep your eyes peeled for those, and we will be expanding our team even further.

We’re sure it’s going to be another great one - but until then we’re wishing you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! 🎄🥂