A development bank has just minted a unicorn, and it took two years.

Ominimo, a Budapest-based motor insurance startup founded by Serbian and Hungarian entrepreneurs, has closed a Series B led by the venture arm of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. The round is €20.1mn, or about $22.5mn, at a €1.4bn valuation, EU-Startups reported.

Ominimo confirmed the round itself, putting the figure at $1.6bn and calling EBRD “an exceptionally founder-friendly and pragmatic investor”.

The company launched in 2024. It reached a billion-euro valuation faster than any of the EBRD’s previous unicorns, which include PandaDoc, DocPlanner and PicsArt, Tech Funding News reported. Those took years.

The number that moved

Ominimo closed its Series A in 2025 at a €200mn valuation, twelve months after going live. Zurich Insurance came in then as both a distribution partner and a minority shareholder.

That makes this a sevenfold repricing in roughly a year. The premiums explain some of it.

Annualised gross written premium has gone from €26.3mn in 2024 to €157.8mn in 2025, and now sits near €307mn. That is close to twelvefold in two years, across nearly a million customers.

The company is profitable, and says it has been profitable in Hungary since launch. For a fast-scaling insurtech that is unusual enough to be the headline on its own.

What Ominimo actually is

Here is the part that complicates the valuation. Ominimo does not underwrite.

It operates as a managing general agent. It prices the risk, sells the policy, owns the customer and handles claims. The insurance risk itself sits with partner carriers.

Those partners are Signal Iduna in Hungary and DA Direkt, Zurich’s German unit, in Poland, the Netherlands and Sweden. Ominimo’s own site describes Signal Iduna as its sponsor.

The pricing is where the company claims its edge. It says it uses hundreds of data points to price a driver, against the five or six a traditional insurer might use.

The staffing backs that up. Around two-thirds of its roughly 130 people work in data science or software, and the team includes eight Mathematics Olympiad medallists and one Physics Olympiad medallist. Headcount is meant to reach 150 by the end of the year.

Founder and chief executive Dusan Komar claims more than that. Ominimo says it has assembled “the highest concentration of data science, software engineering and insurance talent in Europe”, which is the sort of line a company writes about itself and nobody else can check.

The licence, and what it would cost

Part of the new money is going towards Ominimo getting its own insurance licence. That would let it keep profits it currently shares with its carriers.

It would also mean holding capital against the risk. Tech Funding News puts the requirement at roughly 20 cents of regulatory capital for every euro of premium underwritten.

Licences are also not guaranteed. Wise was refused a US trust bank charter this month, while Revolut won an Australian banking licence at a $115bn valuation. Regulators decide the timetable, not the cap table.

The comparison the sector keeps making

Europe has run this experiment before, expensively. Tech Funding News points to wefox, once the continent’s best-funded insurtech at a $4.5bn valuation, which it reports is now shedding business units and seeking emergency financing after growing without matching underwriting discipline.

Ominimo pitches itself as the corrective. Profitable first, expand second.

Others are running the same play from different starting points. Alan raised €480mn from Prosus on a discipline-led pitch in health cover, Sweden’s Lassie reached $100mn ARR before raising again, and Corgi hit unicorn status having built a full-stack carrier from the start rather than renting one.

Where it goes next

Ominimo already sells in Hungary, Poland, the Netherlands and Sweden. Belgium and Romania follow this summer, then Spain, Italy and France. It wants to be in the United States in 2027.

It also intends to launch new lines of business. Everything Ominimo sells today is motor cover, so that is a second expansion running alongside the geographic one, into risks its pricing model has never been tested on.

The EBRD’s involvement is worth noting on its own terms. Its venture arm typically writes cheques between €2mn and €30mn, and its mandate is economic development across central and eastern Europe, the Middle East, north Africa and central Asia, rather than backing consumer fintech winners.

A development lender helping build a billion-euro insurer out of Budapest is a different kind of result for that mandate.

The open question

Ominimo is valued at €1.4bn on distribution and data science. It is not yet valued as an insurer, because it is not yet carrying an insurer’s risk.

The licence changes that. It converts a capital-light intermediary into a business that must reserve against its own claims, and it is the moment when a pricing model gets marked to reality.

Ominimo has been right about pricing so far, in four countries, profitably. The next few years will show whether being right about pricing is the same thing as being an insurance company.

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