Robot agents

Even robots need insurance. Alumni partners Jim Duan and Kamron Khodjaev find niche insuring autonomous vehicles, and the tech world is taking notice.

BY KIMBERLY K. BARLOW

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, 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.

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 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.

Jim Duan '13-'14 is co-founder of Koop Technologies. While the company is based in Pittsburgh, Duan is living in Toronto.

DEVON BRUNI

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.

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.”

Kamron Khodjaev ’12-’15 takes a break at Nova Place, a repurposed shopping mall in Pittsburgh where Koop Technologies has its office.

AIMEE OBIDZINSKI

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, the three 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,” Khodjaev said.

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 (Advanced Technologies Group) 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, where 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.

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.

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.”

Khodjaev and Duan both knew from the time they were young that they wanted to study in America. Neither had visited the United States before arriving for classes at Pitt, but both are glad for the start they got at Pitt-Bradford.

“You want to go to the best-ranking schools in the States, and Pitt has a really good reputation,” Duan said. “Then I saw the pictures of the Bradford campus, and I could imagine myself being there.”

Khodjaev arrived on campus in fall 2012, just one semester before Duan. He focused his college search on high-quality campuses in the Eastern United States, to be near relatives in the Washington, D.C., area.

“I always wanted to be in business,” said Khodjaev, who grew up the eldest of three brothers in an entrepreneurial family. “I wanted to come to America for the opportunities and the open environment for entrepreneurs.”

As he searched online, he recalls being intrigued by photos of the clouds touching the hills around Pitt-Bradford and by images of Pitt’s campus buildings.

When he was offered a Panther scholarship at the Bradford campus, he jumped at the opportunity. “My goal was to leave the country and be independent. When I got accepted to Pitt, I got my visa, got my tickets and packed my bags.”

Upon arriving, he discovered he hadn’t fully comprehended the concept of regional campuses. Recalling the photos, “I began asking where the Cathedral of Learning was. Then I realized I was pretty far from the main campus,” he said.

But at Pitt-Bradford, the small campus environment fostered friendships with faculty and fellow students alike, Khodjaev said. “I liked that we had great relationships with our professors. John Crawford became a friend. Economics classes with Shailendra Gajanan and Gautam Mukerjee were super-interesting.”

Duan and Khodjaev also praised Pitt Bradford’s comprehensive orientation materials and programs developed by Dr. Ron Binder, then-associate dean of student affairs, and Kristin Asinger, then-director of international studies.

The campus’s VISA Mentor Program, which pairs new international students with a fellow international student mentor, helped them adjust to life on campus.

“My mentor, who was from Germany, was like a big brother to me,” Duan said. He connected Duan to a social circle that included both international students and classmates from the Pitt-Bradford region. The experience immersed him in American culture and helped him quickly improve his English.

“Going from a megacity of 16 million to a small town of 8,000 people was a big cultural shock. But it also had its advantages,” Duan said. “It helped me to adapt quickly to American culture and to rural culture. Had I gone to big city schools at the very beginning, I would have been less likely to get out of my comfort zone.”

Duan also remembers the encouragement of former Vice President and Dean of Student Affairs Dr. K. James Evans. “It was always inspirational when I sat with him,” Duan said, recalling spontaneous conversations in the hallways or over lunch in the dining hall.

Going from a megacity of 16 million to a small town of 8,000 people was a big cultural shock. But it also had its advantages. It helped me to adapt quickly to American culture and to rural culture.

“He was always very caring and welcoming for international students like me. He encouraged me to do something that I wanted to do.

“Without their help I wouldn’t be here today.”

Duan encouraged fellow students to stray from their comfort zone and take entrepreneurial chances. “If there’s an opportunity to move across the country to pursue something you think is impossible, give it a shot,” he said. “The entrepreneurship journey can’t be forced upon you. You have to decide to take the risks.”