AXA's $250M venture capital fund dedicated to emerging strategic innovations in insurance and financial services has added four new companies to its portfolio, marking a total of $6 million in seven US startups since the fund was launched in February of this year.
New companies added to the AXA portfolio are mobile-first bank Bee, predictive analytics company PriceMethod, online stockpicking firm GoldBean and marketing platform CoPromote.
Bee was launched in New York in June and has so far picked up 3200 clients. The direct bank is on course to start operating in San Francisco and Oakland this month.
These four companies join ASV’s US portfolio, which also includes investments in PolicyGenius, Limelight Health and VolunteerSpot.
ASV US's general partner, Manish Agarwal says the fund plans to continue a similar pace of investments in the coming year.
“Our world is becoming more transparent, digitally enabled and customer centric,” he says. “These developments are changing financial services and we are excited that our portfolio is helping shape this trend. Through these new companies, we want to capture innovation and invest in technologies that will tomorrow transform our industry.”
The fund currently has four offices in San Francisco, New York, London, Paris and will soon open an outpost in Hong Kong to tap into the burgeoning South East Asian startup community.
AXA has already successfully seeded start-ups in Europe, with investments in five companies through the “AXA Seed Factory” - a seed fund launched in France in June 2013 that has since been folded into AXA SV.