This startup is helping the insurance industry understand autonomous vehicles

A decade ago, Jim Duan (BUS ’15) and Kamron Khodjaev (BUS ’16) were newcomers to America and first-year students at Pitt-Bradford.

Today, they are part of the co-founding team at Koop Technologies, a Pittsburgh-based insurance technology startup that specializes in serving the growing self-driving vehicle industry and other robotics-based operations.

Duan and Khodjaev co-founded the company in 2020 with two partners who likewise were far from home: fellow Pitt graduate Sergey Litvinenko (BUS ’16) and senior software engineer Zak Gazizov, both of whom are from Russia.

In just a short time, the company has gained attention in the region and beyond. In mid-2021, Koop announced $2.5 million in seed funding from Silicon Valley venture capital firms.

Soon after, Koop was among a handful of companies chosen for the seventh cohort of the Lloyd’s Lab innovation accelerator program. By November, Litvinenko was presenting Koop’s autonomy insurance platform to the markets in London as part of the Lloyd’s Lab Demo Day.

And as 2021 came to a close, Koop Technologies was named a “Startup to Watch in 2022” by Pittsburgh Inno, a news source focused on the city’s startups, tech, growth and innovation ecosystem.

For Khodjaev, who grew up in Tashkent, the capital city of Uzbekistan, and Duan, who hails from Chengdu, the capital of China’s Sichuan province, finding a future business partner on a small campus half a world away was not on their minds when they began searching for colleges.

It was their mutual desire for a quality American education that led them to Pitt, and to their arrival just one semester apart at Pitt-Bradford where they forged a friendship.

That serendipitous meeting, their mutual entrepreneurial drive, and the additional friendships they made when they moved on to finish their degrees on the University’s Pittsburgh campus, eventually led to the formation of Koop’s founding team.

“They were two of my best students,” said John J. Crawford, assistant professor of finance at Pitt-Bradford. “Their ability to interpret and understand financial information and their business management acumen was very high.”

Crawford remembers Duan as stellar in analyzing financials and crunching numbers. “He really stood out with his analysis,” delving deep into corporate annual reports and financials in his class projects to uncover the “whys” underlying a company’s profits or losses.

Khodjaev was insightful, cutting-edge and a natural leader who helped establish the campus’ student investment club and served as the group’s president

Both he and Duan were active in the group, which organized a road trip to New York City to explore career opportunities in the financial district.

[Read more stories from Pitt-Bradford.]

“I’m very proud to see they’re taking the skills and tools they developed here and are really putting those to work for themselves. It’s awesome that they’re taking a risk on an opportunity like this.”

Duan moved on to the Pittsburgh campus after a year and a half at Pitt-Bradford. There he met Litvinenko through Pitt’s Alpha Kappa Psi professional business fraternity. Khodjaev joined their circle when he too decided to finish his degree in Pittsburgh.

After graduation, they parted ways to go on to graduate school and careers. Litvinenko, whose Pitt degree focused on finance with concentrations in economics and math, went to Wall Street. Duan’s career took him to Miami, and later to Toronto, where he is active in the Pitt Alumni Association. For now, he is managing operations for Koop remotely, with a plan to return to Pittsburgh soon.

Khodjaev got his start with a Pittsburgh-based venture capital fund and later joined one of its portfolio companies, which sold fuel-efficiency technology to the trucking industry.

Their complementary skill sets, business experience and entrepreneurial desire motivated the friends to contemplate partnering in their own startup.

“The fact that we have known each other for years has given us more trust. We already know each other’s work style,” Duan said.

Meeting Gazizov through social connections within Pittsburgh’s tight-knit tech community completed the team. “We were friends first, and that friendship emerged into a business partnership as well,” said Khodjaev.

Their entrepreneurial journey is gaining momentum amid the region’s rise as a center for robotics and autonomous vehicle innovation.

“We owe a lot to Pittsburgh. It’s really the place to be right now, building a business in that space,” said Khodjaev, Koop’s chief commercial officer.

“If we were not in Pittsburgh we wouldn’t have come up with the idea, and we would not have met our friend and chief technical officer, Zak Gazizov, who was at Uber ATG building autonomous vehicles.”

Koop’s business is centered on helping the insurance industry catch up with the needs of the robotics and autonomous vehicle industry. Premiums are extremely high because of the lack of historic data.

Traditional insurance solutions understand human risks, but because machines don’t behave like humans, autonomous technologies present different risks that require new underwriting models. Koop seeks to solve this issue and bridge the gap between the two industries.

The company’s platform enables autonomous vehicle companies to share data and in turn receive data-driven coverage. Koop also provides data to insurance companies to help them appropriately tailor coverage to clients in autonomous technology industries.

Self-driving vehicles are not futuristic science fiction. “It’s a reality much closer than you might imagine,” said Duan, Koop’s head of operations, noting that autonomous delivery robots and driverless robotaxis already operate in multiple cities, and that labor shortages, exacerbated by the pandemic, have accelerated investment in self-driving truck fleets.

Said Khodjaev, “Everyone knows it’s going to be big. Companies are adding a lot of value by making vehicles autonomous. You can already see all these companies going public and making commercial investments.”

Added Duan, “This really is just the beginning of our journey. We are looking forward to getting more work done and bringing more benefits to the autonomous vehicle industry and the insurance world as well. We will be really proud of ourselves if we are a true enabler of the commercialization of self-driving vehicles.”

A longer version of this story originally appeared in the latest issue of Portraits magazine, a publication from the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford.

Crawford said he expected Duan and Khodjaev to go on to careers in fund management or trading. “But it didn’t surprise me when I learned that they were pursuing an entrepreneurial venture.

“The fact that the two of them are collaborating and working together makes sense,” Crawford said, adding that the synergy in their strong leadership and analytic skills is a winning combination.