Even robots need insurance. Alumni partners Jim Duan and Kamron Khodjaev find niche insuring autonomous vehicles, and the tech world is taking notice.
A decade ago, Jim Duan ’13-’14 and Kamron Khodjaev ’12-’15 were newcomers to America and firstyear students at Pitt-Bradford. Today they are part of the cofounding 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 startup in 2020 with two partners who likewise were far from home: fellow Pitt graduate Sergey Litvinenko 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 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,
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 PittBradford. “Their ability to interpret and understand financial information and their business management acumen were 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, cuttingedge and a natural leader who helped establish the campus’s 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.
ROBOT AGENTS B Y K I M B E R LY K . B A R L O W
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. “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.” winter 2022
DEVON BRUNI
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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 – a city of 2.5 million people – 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.
