Accelerant Holdings, the tech-focused company that helps its members exchange or transfer risk more effectively, while connecting them with long-term capital, has upsized and renewed its Flywheel Re collateralized reinsurance sidecar, securing meaningfully increased capital backing from core investor Barings, LLC in the process.
Accelerant has launched an initial public offering (IPO) and revealed growing premiums, revenue and net income in the process as its business expanded over the last year.
Gross written premiums transacted across its Risk Exchange reached $3.5 billion over the year to March 31st 2025, backed by 96 risk capital partners, some of which comes through the institutional investor capital backing its Flywheel Re reinsurance sidecar.
The company reported a 75% jump in revenues for full-year 2024 and more recently a 39% increase to $178 million for the three months ended March 31st 2025.
With a growing business that focuses on helping members efficiently access risk capital, the Flywheel Re sidecar structure has been renewed and increased in size, the IPO filing discloses.
Accelerant launched the Flywheel Re collateralized reinsurance sidecar in 2022 with $175 million of capital and four institutional investors were backing it through the first three-year term, which ended in June this year.
Flywheel Re provides reinsurance to Accelerant Underwriting via quota share arrangements, so gives its investor backers a way to access the returns of specialty insurance business transacted by the company.
Around 27% of the business is reinsured back to Flywheel Re, demonstrating its core strategic importance to Accelerant.
For that first three-year term, the IPO filings shows that one of Accelerant’s equity backers, Barings, LLC, a global investment management firm owned by MassMutual, entities affiliated with Barings purchased approximately 12,810,990 preference shares for a purchase price of $12.8 million in August 2022 in the sidecar structure.
Now, Flywheel Re has been renewed and upsized, for a new three-year term to June 2028, Accelerate disclosed.
The company stated, “In June 2025, upsized capital was raised from institutional investors, including entities affiliated with Barings LLC, to support business assumed by Flywheel Re during a multi-year risk period scheduled to end in March 2028. In connection with the June 2025 capital raise, the entities affiliated with Barings LLC committed to contribute up to $105 million in capital to support Flywheel Re over a three-year period.”
So that is a meaningful increase in capital contributed to the Flywheel Re sidecar by Barings for the next term, suggesting the overall size of the sidecar has grown significantly.
Accelerant also said, “We expect Flywheel Re to become a larger part of our risk capital offering as this source of risk capital adds diversification, predictability, and stability to the “demand side” of our platform. The participation of institutional investors and reinsurers also diversifies our sources of risk capital and introduces competitive tension that regulates the cost of capital.
“We believe Flywheel Re incorporates a structure that provides multi-year underwriting capacity to support the Risk Exchange platform portfolio as it grows.”
Flywheel Re creates “more predictability and stability in capacity availability, enabling institutional investors to access risk through our Risk Exchange,” Accelerant also said.
Explaining the trend for alternative capital investors to increasingly seek out insurance-linked securities (ILS) opportunities, the company further explained, “There is growing demand from institutional investors for the type of risk in our portfolio. Institutional investors value the returns associated with underwriting that exhibits a low correlation with financial market conditions. In addition, the low volatility of the Risk Exchange portfolio further enhances this diversification. Historically, these institutional investors were limited to investing in short-term, narrow property catastrophe-focused opportunities. Accelerant meets investor demand for opportunities to participate more broadly across the specialty P&C insurance market.
“Flywheel Re delivers superior diversification in a capital-efficient structure that allows investors to access attractive returns across a large number of insurance products and across multiple underwriting periods.”
We don’t at this time know the size of the Flywheel Re reinsurance sidecar renewal, but based on the meaningfully increased investment from Barings, it seems safe to assume it will now be much larger than the initial $175 million it had launched with.
Find details of numerous reinsurance sidecar investments and transactions in our directory of collateralized reinsurance sidecars transactions.
