Akur8 Deploy Named a 'Luminary' in Celent’s 2026 Global Rating Engine Reports

Akur8’s cloud-based rating engine, Deploy, has been designated as a Luminary in Celent’s 2026 Property Casualty Rating Engine reports for both North America and the global market. This recognition highlights a shift toward cloud-native architectures that bridge the gap between actuarial modeling and production environments for P&C carriers.

What was announced

Akur8 announced that its Deploy solution received the highest possible designation in Celent’s evaluation of the property and casualty rating engine market. The Luminary status is awarded to technology solutions that demonstrate a combination of advanced technical architecture and a broad range of functional capabilities, alongside a significant market presence.

The evaluation featured in two separate reports: the 2026 North America edition and the Global edition of Celent’s Property Casualty Rating Engine reports. Deploy is designed as a cloud-based engine that allows actuarial teams to maintain control over pricing models as they move from the development phase into live production. By automating the transition from modeling to quoting, the platform aims to reduce the time-to-market for rate changes and ensure that complex pricing strategies are executed accurately at the point of sale.

According to the evaluation criteria, the Luminary ranking identifies vendors that are leading the market in terms of innovation and utility. For P&C carriers, the focus of the report is on how these engines handle increasingly sophisticated pricing models and the speed at which rate adjustments can be deployed in a volatile risk environment. The recognition suggests that the platform’s ability to pair strong functionality with modern architecture is meeting the strategic needs of carriers looking to modernize their pricing chains.

"A rating engine sits at the most sensitive point in an insurer’s pricing chain: it is where months of modeling work either reaches customers accurately or doesn’t. We designed Deploy so that the people who understand the rates best stay in control of them all the way to the quote. Seeing Celent recognize Deploy as a Luminary tells us that approach resonates with carriers in every market we serve."

Samuel Falmagne, CEO & Co-founder at AKUR8

The companies involved

Akur8 is a global actuarial AI platform that specializes in automating insurance pricing and reserving processes. The company’s technology is designed to enhance the speed and transparency of the underwriting process for P&C insurers, moving away from traditional manual modeling toward machine-learning-driven insights that remain compliant and explainable. By focusing on the intersection of data science and actuarial science, the firm provides tools that allow carriers to refine their risk assessment without losing the "human-in-the-loop" oversight required for regulatory adherence.

Celent is a prominent research and advisory firm focused on the financial services industry, providing analysis on technology trends for banks, insurers, and wealth management firms. Celent is a subsidiary of GlobalData, a major data analytics and consulting company. The firm’s "Luminary" designation is part of its recurring vendor evaluation series, which assesses the capabilities of core systems and specialized insurance software. Celent’s insurance practice monitors the evolution of the modern tech stack in insurance, focusing on how carriers can replace legacy systems with cloud-native solutions to improve operational efficiency and response times to market shifts.

What FF News has reported before

FF News has closely followed Akur8’s expansion into automated actuarial workflows. In October 2026, the publication reported on how Akur8 Launches AI Agents to Automate Actuarial Pricing and Workflow Efficiency, marking a significant step in the company’s use of generative AI to streamline complex pricing tasks. Additionally, the 2026 Celent reports have highlighted other key players in the P&C space; FF News recently covered how Duck Creek Claims Secures Top "Luminary" Rating in Celent 2026 P&C Insurance Report. These reports underscore a broader industry trend where incumbent vendors and specialist insurtechs are competing to define the next generation of cloud-based core insurance infrastructure.

What this means from an insurtech perspective

The recognition of a specialist rating engine like Deploy as a "Luminary" signals a breakdown in the traditional dominance of end-to-end legacy suites. For years, P&C carriers struggled with the "actuarial gap"—the delay between a risk model being finalized and its implementation in a core system. By elevating a cloud-native, standalone rating engine to the top tier, the market is acknowledging that modular, "best-of-breed" components are becoming essential for competitive pricing. This puts pressure on traditional core-system vendors to improve their native rating capabilities or risk being sidelined by specialized engines that offer faster deployment and better transparency for regulators and brokers alike.