Ominimo has secured first part of funding for the ongoing Series B round, backed by the investment arm of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD). The deal assigns the Novi Sad-headquartered startup a valuation of €1.48 billion ($1.60 billion), officially making it Serbia’s first tech unicorn.

It all started not even two years ago, when a team of former McKinsey consultants decided to rewrite the insurance playbook.

Dušan Komar (CEO), Laslo Horvath (CTO), and Dennis Weinbender, wanted to tackle mandatory auto insurance, a commoditized, heavily regulated product dominated by centuries-old corporations. With exceptional data science team they have built an underwriting engine in Serbia that turned motor insurance into a profitable €1.48 billion enterprise.

For Central and Eastern Europe, the milestone carries symbolic weight, as Komar stated following the unicorn status announcement:

"This is a big moment, first of all for Ominimo, but I believe also for the entire Serbian startup ecosystem. When a country gets its first unicorn, international investment funds start to look at that country differently, and the chances of new big startups emerging from it become greater."

From $230 million to $1.6 billion valuation

Over roughly 15 months, Ominimo expanded its business from a valuation of €212.75 million ($230.00 million) during its Series A round (May 2025) lead by Zurich Insurance Group, to $1.6 billion valuation and unicorn status. Ominimo is not disclosing the Series B amount at the moment as some investors will still join subsequently. 

A central question for investors during the company's early expansion was whether a model calibrated in Hungary (where Ominimo captured a 7.00% market share and sold over 300,000 policies in its first 12 months) could scale across borders.

Recent sales data indicates that the expansion model is working. Just recently in June 2026, they set a company record by selling over $1 million worth of insurance policies in 24 hours, with the majority of new volume coming from its expansion markets in the Netherlands and Poland. Based on that week’s performance, Komar shared their annualized Gross Written Premium (GWP) exceeded $300 million.

Crucially, this growth is being underwritten at a combined ratio between 92.00% and 100.00%, even after accounting for ultimate claim liabilities, including Reported But Not Settled (RBNS) claims and Incurred But Not Reported (IBNR) provisions. In an industry where growing competitors routinely operate at combined ratios above 115.00%, maintaining a ratio at or below 100.00% confirms that the business generates an underwriting profit on the policies it writes.

With fresh backing from the EBRD, Ominimo plans to expand its footprint into six additional European Union markets and enter the United States within the next 12 months, testing whether its algorithm-driven underwriting model can challenge incumbent insurers on a global scale.

"Ominimo is one of the most impressive insurtech companies we have evaluated so far, thanks to the combination of exceptional growth and strong business foundations. We are glad to be able to support the company in the next phase of its development and look forward to a long-term partnership on its further growth path."

-- said Bruno Lusic from the EBRD.

Disrupting traditional insurance

The technical flaw in traditional motor insurance stems from how incumbents segment risk. On a hypothetical market of 10 million drivers, legacy insurers typically group customers into 10,000 to 100,000 broad buckets based on static demographic data. Because safe and unsafe drivers end up in the same risk pool, low-risk policyholders overpay to subsidize high-risk drivers.

This gap turned out to be a rock in the shoe for a couple of McKinsey consultants who spent over a decade advising European insurers (now the Omnimo's executive team). They observed that incumbents were consistently held back by three structural bottlenecks: outdated IT architecture, slow corporate decision-making, and an acute shortage of data science talent. "We had already built similar businesses multiple times, just not for ourselves," commented Komar for Serbian NIN when they landed Series A.

So, instead of relying on broad risk pools, Ominimo built a pricing infrastructure capable of calculating individualized rates for millions of unique driver profiles using extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) algorithms.

"Our proprietary pricing technology allows us to identify lower-risk drivers more accurately than traditional insurers and offer them some of the most competitive premiums in the market, while maintaining strong underwriting profitability."

--explained Komar for The Recursive.

Data Science behind it all

But how did they manage to calculate individualized rates for millions of unique driver profiles? Insurtechs historically struggled because they functioned as software wrappers on top of legacy infrastructure or spent heavily on acquiring customers directly. To avoid those traps Omnimo focused heavily on the engineering aspect.

Ominimo’s technical operations are anchored in Belgrade and Novi Sad, where the company recruits local mathematical talent. The average age across its engineering and data science teams is 25, and the group includes eight medalists from international mathematics and physics Olympiads.

"Our desire is to continue attracting young talents from Serbia to join us in solving the most complex problems in the field of artificial intelligence in the world of insurance," shared Komar in the announcement.

This infrastructure gives the firm significant operational leverage. While software engineers, data scientists, and business analysts make up under 5.00% of staff at traditional insurance companies, they account for over two-thirds of Ominimo’s 100-person workforce, pointed Komar.

For NetokracijaRS, Laslo Horvath also shared then their entire infrastructure is engineered internally on a cloud-native microservices architecture. What this means? Because the core platform is cloud-based and vendor-independent, expanding into a new geographic market requires only deploying localized configuration parameters rather than rebuilding software infrastructure. This architectural design enables linear infrastructure cost increases alongside exponential user acquisition.

Most importantly, by maintaining complete ownership over both code and actuarial models, the engineering team introduces new system features in single days rather than the six-month iteration cycles typical among legacy insurance carriers.

Majority are not direct sales

Last but not least differentiator for Ominimo is their business model.

"...our strategy is to meet customers where they already are, rather than spending significant marketing budgets trying to drive traffic exclusively to our own website," shared Komar for The Recursive.

Approximately one in five policies Ominimo currently sells is purchased directly through their own website. Instead, it integrates directly into aggregator platforms, price comparison engines, and broker networks where drivers already search for coverage. This keeps customer acquisition costs minimal.

The share of purchases through their own website continues to increase as their brand awareness grows, added Komar pointing that, however, their objective is not to maximise direct sales at the expense of other channels.

"Our philosophy is to make it as easy as possible for customers to buy our products through the channel they naturally prefer. This is why, in every market where we operate, we partner with price comparison websites, brokers and other distribution partners alongside our own direct channel. We view these channels as complementary rather than competing, and believe this omnichannel approach is one of the key drivers of our growth."

Their recent expansion to Netherlands and Poland proved this model works, but more about their exponential growth and future plans find out this week in the upcoming deep-dive interview with Dušan Komar.

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