The Partners
Twelve years of insurance. Eight years of financial data science. We invest what we understand.
Mads Kjeldsen
Managing Partner
Mads began his career as a qualified actuary at a Scandinavian reinsurer, where he priced catastrophe bonds, structured treaty reinsurance, and built the loss models that governed the firm's exposure to tail events. That work required understanding not just what historical loss data shows, but what it structurally cannot show about rare or unprecedented events — a limitation that sits at the core of why conventional actuarial tables are being replaced by models that read live data.
He subsequently joined a Copenhagen-based digital insurer as Chief Product Officer, growing the company from its first policies to 400,000 policyholders before a trade sale in 2018. Working at the intersection of loss modelling and product design gave him a precise view of where the actuarial infrastructure broke down: the model was priced at inception and static for twelve months, while the risk was not. He founded Morildsen in 2019 to back seed-stage founders building the architecture that closes that gap.
At Morildsen, Mads leads investment decisions and holds board positions in the majority of portfolio companies, focusing on the governance and regulatory obligations that early-stage insurance companies consistently underestimate — particularly the Solvency II capital implications and FCA/EIOPA relationship management that generalist VC boards are not positioned to support.
Astrid Holm
General Partner
Astrid joined Morildsen in 2020. Before moving into venture, she spent eight years building and operating large-scale ML systems in financial services — environments where a model failure is not a performance metric problem, but an immediate financial exposure event with regulatory consequences.
As Head of Data Science at a Nordic banking group, she built and operated the fraud detection system processing €2 billion in daily transaction volume. The engineering requirements were production-grade: model drift monitoring across shifting fraud patterns, false positive management at a scale where each percentage point represented millions of decisions, and adversarial feature engineering in an environment where fraud actors adapt to the scoring signals in real time. She then joined a Berlin insurtech as VP Engineering, scaling the technical team and managing the architectural transition from a monolithic underwriting system to distributed services — the exact transition most of our portfolio companies will eventually face.
At Morildsen, Astrid leads technical diligence across all investments and provides architecture advisory to portfolio CTOs. The specific challenges she focuses on — EIOPA explainability requirements in tension with gradient boosting architectures, data drift in claims frequency models, regulatory-compliant feature selection in underwriting — do not appear in general ML literature. They are the domain-specific problems that determine whether an insurance ML product survives contact with a real carrier relationship.
Frederik Brandt
Principal
Frederik joined Morildsen in 2022. He spent five years as a management consultant at a top-three firm, specialising in insurance transformation — advising Nordic carriers on digital strategy, distribution model redesign, and technology vendor evaluation. His clients ranged from Scandinavian mutual societies with century-old underwriting practices to pan-European composites rebuilding their distribution architecture in response to InsurTech entrants.
That work gives Morildsen something specific that most seed funds do not have: direct knowledge of how incumbent insurers evaluate new technology vendors. Which internal sponsor matters at each stage of the decision. What commercial terms are genuinely acceptable at procurement versus what gets rejected. How to frame a capability in terms of a carrier's loss ratio problem rather than a technology problem. Frederik completed his MBA at Copenhagen Business School before joining the firm.
At Morildsen, Frederik leads deal sourcing and LP relations, and works directly with portfolio companies on enterprise sales strategy. The assistance is specific: translating the product into the language of Chief Underwriting Officers, mapping the internal decision path at target carriers, and anticipating the objections that typically surface at procurement — before founders encounter them unprepared.
Get in touch
We respond to every founder note. Tell us what you are building, why the insurance distribution or underwriting problem you are addressing has not been solved well before, and why now is when the conditions have changed.
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