"AXA Strategic Ventures" thematic conference

Minutes:

AXA Strategic Ventures driving innovation

Set up in early 2015, with an investment capacity of €230 million, AXA Strategic Ventures (ASV) invests in innovative startups looking to transform the insurance and asset management business.
During a conference on March 17, Sébastien Loubry, Business Development and Communications Director at ASV, gave a presentation to AXA’s shareholders on this fund and its importance within AXA's ecosystem.

Growing numbers of startups are investing in the insurance industry with innovative models that will drive improvements across all the links in our value chain, covering a range of issues from health to connected cars and virtual advisors. Sébastien Loubry highlighted the stakes involved for the Group to interact with these promising firms in order to help them grow and benefit from their expertise to further strengthen the quality of our products and services.

The AXA Group is able to count on:

• Kamet, an incubator for technological innovations to help entrepreneurs carry out their projects. €100 million have been invested to identify the outstanding small firms that will be able to support our business’ future transformation and make it more accessible for future generations.
• ASV, a global venture capital fund, which aims to invest in startups with technologies that can help improve our customer experience. Examples in terms of digital health include Medlanes, a Berlin-based startup that provides online medical advice and care, or Flyr, which is able to predict and guarantee the future prices of pre-booked flights, as well as Neura, which is developing useful automatic learning technologies, particularly with connected devices.

ASV invests in the seed phase (beginning of the startup lifecycle) and growth phase (when startups accelerate). The fund has four offices in San Francisco, New York, London and Paris. A new office will be opening soon in Hong Kong.
It has made 17 investments to date in Europe and the US.

The Group is supported by a whole ecosystem of complementary initiatives to promote and integrate innovation and improve its customer experience: Startin, an internal innovation program fostering intrapreneurship among its employees, the AXA Labs in San Francisco and Shanghai to capture the most promising new trends, and the Data Innovation Labs in Paris and Singapore, which are centers of expertise on big data.

All these initiatives are helping accelerate our digital transformation.