Guest blog by Amira Nakouri, CEO and co-founder of SaaS Startup Klaimy
TL;DR
- We built the SaaS startup Klaimy to fix a hidden pain point in life and health insurance: processing complex medical documents.
- In late 2023, we had no product – just a pitch deck and a clear problem to solve.
- It took relentless hustle to land our first two design partners with which we launched our first PoCs: Entoria and Magnolia.
- We co-developed the MVP through 18,000+ data points and deep collaboration with underwriters.
- Insurtech Gateway backed our £1m round, we’re now scaling into new use cases.
- Our goal: to become the go-to medical AI assistant for insurance teams.
Where it all began
I’ve always been someone who likes a challenge. I started my career in strategy consulting, working with large insurers on digital transformation. Over time, I came to understand how deeply manual many of the industry’s core processes still are – especially in life and health insurance.
Medical underwriting and claims rely on huge volumes of unstructured documents: ECGs, doctor notes, medical exams, lab reports. Interpreting these files is time-consuming and error-prone. I saw firsthand how this slows down decisions, frustrates teams, and impacts the end customer.
In 2022, with the rise of large language models (LLMs), I knew there was a unique opportunity to solve this. It felt like the right moment to build a product – and a company.
The right team at the right time
I didn’t want to do it alone. I knew I needed technical co-founders with deep AI expertise. In April 2023, I joined the Antler programme in Paris, which brings together founders from business, tech, and industry backgrounds. That’s where I met Yazid Hadni, our CPO, and later Juan Barragan, our CTO.
Yazid is a data scientist who had previously built an underwriting automation tool for a large French mutual. He also worked in venture capital, which gave him a strong product and business mindset. Juan is a second-time founder and AI engineer with more than 15 years of experience building scalable machine learning systems. Together, we had the right balance of insurance knowledge, AI expertise, and product vision.
Customer first, product second
We spent the summer of 2023 doing more than 350 interviews with insurance experts. We wanted to deeply understand the pain points — not just from decision-makers, but from the people working directly with medical files. Very early, we saw a clear signal: life insurance was a high-friction area, and everything depended on document handling.
In September 2023, armed only with a pitch deck and a plan, we started approaching insurers. No product, no demo — just a clear belief in the problem and our ability to solve it. Getting that first ‘yes’ wasn’t easy. We were targeting a niche area that many considered too complex to automate. And insurance is not a sector known for taking risks on early-stage startups.
We showed up at a Paris insurance forum with no booth, no backing — just determination. We pitched Klaimy booth-by-booth, gathering contacts, refining our message, and staying open to feedback. It was a real hustle. I think that kind of door-to-door persistence is underrated, especially in enterprise SaaS.
After countless rejections and unanswered emails, we secured our first design partner: Entoria, #2 wholesale broker in France specialist in Health insurance for individuals and in construction. It was a turning point.
That initial trust gave us a platform to co-build and validate our solution. Shortly after, we connected with Magnolia, a visionary MGA in loan insurance. That conversation started with a cold LinkedIn message. It turned into a real partnership, because they saw how our technology could be adapted to an even more complex use case.
Both of these partners gave us access to real-world data and trusted us enough to shape something new, from scratch. We trained our models using more than 18,000 annotated medical data points. We spent hours listening to underwriters and claims handlers, learning how they made decisions and what they actually needed from a tool like ours.
By September 2024, we had a validated MVP — co-built with the people who would eventually use it.
What we built
Klaimy is an AI-powered co-pilot for medical underwriters and claims handlers. Our platform automates the extraction and interpretation of data from both structured and unstructured documents. It doesn’t just pull information – it understands medical vocabulary, links diseases to treatments, and highlights key risk factors.
What sets Klaimy apart:
- We specialise in high-complexity, low-volume use cases, like loan protection and disability insurance.
- Our models are trained to interpret context, not just text. This includes handwritten notes, fragmented terminology, and complex multi-condition cases. We integrate the business rules of each insurer into the platform.
- Beyond automation, we’re building predictive models that help underwriters anticipate disease progression and claims severity.
We are not just solving for data extraction. We are enabling better decisions, faster.
Why Insurtech Gateway backed us
In October 2024, we closed our £1m Pre-Seed round, led by Insurtech Gateway. Their support was critical – not only financially, but strategically.
From the beginning, we had a strong alignment. Gateway understood our space, our niche, and the depth of the problem we’re solving. They bring specialist insurance knowledge, regulatory support, and access to a global network of insurance partners. As a first-time founder, it was important to me to work with investors who are hands-on and operational. Gateway’s incubator gave us tools and frameworks we use every day – from product development to go-to-market planning.
Klaimy’s future as the trusted medical AI assistant
In 2025, we are expanding Klaimy into workers’ compensation and protection insurance use cases. We are also exploring bodily injury triage in P&C, where our models can help insurers distinguish between complex and non-complex medical claims and better estimate future provisions.
Our long-term goal is clear: to make Klaimy the go-to AI medical assistant for insurance teams.
Not a tool that replaces people, but one that empowers them – by making sense of messy, complex data at speed and scale.
To other SaaS founders looking at insurance
If you’re thinking about launching a SaaS product in this space, my advice is simple:
- Focus on one thing. Insurance is complex. Start with a very specific use case, and build depth before you scale.
- Prepare for long sales cycles. Trust is hard-won in this industry. Build early credibility and stay close to your users.
- Find the right partners. You can’t do it alone. We would not have moved this fast without Insurtech Gateway, our design partners, and our community of early believers.
And finally: Be patient, but persistent. Insurance may move slowly – but when the value is clear, it moves decisively.
A note from Insurtech Gateway
Insurtech Gateway is actively looking for the next generation of SaaS founders tackling large scale insurance problems with bold ideas – just like Amira. We invest early, backing founders with technical expertise and grit. We have everything you need to launch your business fast – regulatory support, insurance product design, capacity and investment capital. Check out our incubator and venture fund or get in touch.