Panora raises $5 million to automate the administrative work of insurance brokers across Europe

Panora, a French insurtech startup founded by Diane du Paty (CEO) and Fabian Langlet, has raised $5 million (€4.6 million) in a Seed round led by Isai, with participation from Kima Ventures, 100in, 199 Ventures, and the founders of Pennylane. Three months after commercial launch, the company has 40 broker clients, including several of the industry's largest firms and international insurers.

Two hundred hours in broker offices

Panora's founding insight came from primary research, not abstraction. The team spent more than 200 hours sitting next to insurance brokers across France, Belgium, and the UK, watching how they actually work.

What they found was a specific and recurring failure: brokers operating across fifteen or more separate insurer portals, none integrated with each other, re-entering the same client information — name, risk profile, coverage requirements — into each one by hand. The job that should be advising clients had become, in practice, a data entry operation.

"We sat next to brokers in Brest, Nice, Antwerp and London as they re-typed the same information into fifteen different extranets," said Diane du Paty. "They all told us the same thing: their job has become data entry instead of advice. Our conviction is that AI should do the work while the broker keeps the advice, the control and the accountability."

Panora's platform automates the operational and administrative layer of insurance brokerage: document collection, quoting workflows, compliance checks, and commission reconciliation. The architecture is model-agnostic — it does not depend on a single AI provider — and includes traceable, auditable workflows and firm-level data encryption designed for the sector's regulatory environment.

The Pennylane comparison

The investor line-up is structured around a specific analogy. Isai leads as Panora's primary backer; Kima Ventures provides its characteristic early-stage velocity; 100in and 199 Ventures round out the institutional side. The Pennylane founders bring the direct precedent: Pennylane did for French SME accounting what Panora aims to do for insurance brokerage — an AI-native platform that automates a domain where the incumbent software is fragmented, old, and built for manual workflows.

The comparison holds structurally. Insurance brokers in France face the same operating conditions that drove Pennylane's adoption in accounting: a market with tight regulatory requirements, large administrative overhead, poor software tooling, and reluctance to switch from established incumbent systems unless the product is clearly superior. Panora's 40 early clients — reached in three months — suggest the product is passing that bar.

Funds go to team expansion, deeper portal integrations, improved AI reliability, and expansion into Belgium and the UK, where the broker operating model is similar enough to France to justify sequential rather than simultaneous entry. The wider European market — different regulatory frameworks in each country — is the medium-term horizon once the initial three-market rollout is established.