Corgi: The full-stack AI native insurance company

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Hi 👋, this is the Today in AI Newsletter: The weekly newsletter bringing you one step closer to building your own startup. 

We analyze a cool, industry-shaping AI startup every week, with a full breakdown of what they do, how they make money, how much they’ve raised, and the opportunity ahead.

Let’s get to the good stuff in this email:

• 💡 This startup bought an insurance carrier and turned it into an AI-native company.

• 📈 They've just hit $40M+ ARR since regulatory approval in July 2025, with sub-1% churn and a team of 70.

• 🚀 They’ve raised $108M (Seed + Series A) at a $630M valuation led by Kindred Ventures.

So what’s the startup and who are the founders behind it? Here’s the story of Corgi 📈

Corgi was founded by Nico Laqua and Emily Yuan in 2024 during the Summer 2024 Y Combinator batch.

Corgi is different from most “insurtech” because it is the carrier. It owns the full stack from underwriting to claims to reinsurance, instead of acting like a broker reselling another carrier’s product.

Their approach is “regulatory bare metal.” They built modern infrastructure instead of relying on old back-office workflows, and they use LLMs to process documents, assess risk, and handle claims.

The product is modular. Founders can toggle coverage modules as the company grows, without the usual back-and-forth paperwork.

Corgi sells the standard startup bundle like D&O, Cyber, and General Liability, and a newer product called AI Liability (AI Malpractice) for companies replacing human workflows with AI systems that might “glitch” and cause revenue loss.

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Backstory 👀

Nico’s story starts online. He grew up deep in niche internet forums, and completely obsessed with community and software.

He’ss the son of Lithuanian immigrants. His father is a pastor and his mother runs a non-profit.

He went on to study Computational Biology and Computer Science at Columbia, which he later criticized as not teaching him how to solve large-scale problems.

Before insurance, Nico built in gaming. He founded Basket Entertainment (which started as a social product called Picnic) and grew it into a gaming publisher with 35+ games and 200M MAU, with $6M revenue reported in 2023.

Emily Yuan is the operator. She attended Stanford, then dropped out in junior year to build companies full time.

Her first major product was Picnic, a Gen Z social app built around “circles” for shared interests, and her 13-year-old sister was one of the earliest users.

Emily’s consumer-tech work led to Forbes 30 Under 30 (2024), and people around her described her as a “smooth talker” who could drive publicity.

They met in college and started working together after Nico sent Emily a social project for feedback. That became Picnic, which later pivoted into Basket.

The personal spark for Corgi came from Nico’s family connection to insurance. His father spent his career as a lawyer for USAA, and Nico remembers watching him “hunt and peck” on a keyboard, which became a symbol of how outdated the industry was.

When ChatGPT 3.5 arrived, Nico saw insurance as the “biggest words-based industry” and believed it could finally be automated by computers that understand language.

The Hustle 🤑

Corgi started with a safer idea. The founders planned to sell AI software to insurance companies.

During YC, they pivoted to the hard version. They decided to become a full-stack carrier to capture more value and drive “direct labor replacement.”

As Kindred Ventures (one of their investors) noted, Nico and Emily approached them saying, “We’d like to raise some money to acquire an insurance and reinsurance carrier”. 

They ended up spending $35M to acquire a decades-old, licensed insurance company – a move that took about 18 months of regulatory legwork to finalize. 

By late 2025, Corgi obtained full regulatory approval not only as an insurance carrier in 49 states but also as a captive reinsurer (so they can spread risk on their own books). 

This gave Corgi a green light to launch what they call the first AI-native insurer built for startups.

Corgi then went from 0 to 1 extremely fast. 

The advantage of being vertically integrated became clear: they could streamline or outright eliminate the traditional middlemen (brokers, wholesale distributors, MGAs) that usually slow things down. 

Instead of weeks of back-and-forth to underwrite a new policy, Corgi’s AI systems can crunch a startup’s data and spit out a custom policy in minutes. 

Need to adjust coverage as you hire more employees or enter a new market? Just toggle on a new module in Corgi’s dashboard – no lengthy forms or renegotiations required. 

By treating insurance contracts as software objects, Corgi can iterate on insurance products like a tech company pushing code updates. 

A prime example is their AI Liability coverage: legacy insurers have been skittish about covering AI-related errors, but Corgi actively embraced it. 

In effect, Corgi is positioning itself as the go-to insurer for any company leaning heavily on AI or other emerging tech that traditional carriers don’t understand.

None of this hustle would be possible without Corgi’s intense company culture. The team operates with a level of commitment that’s extreme even by startup standards. 

Seven-day workweeks are the norm – not as a crunch-time exception, but as a continuous rhythm. 

“If you’re not working seven days a week, you’re kind of quitting a little bit,” - Nico

He’s been on a 7-day schedule himself for the past seven years. 

New employees literally live in the office alongside the founders; after one month, each Corgi hire gets a brand-new mattress as a gift (since chances are, they’ll be sleeping at HQ). 

The team eats many meals together, goes to the gym together, and even spends holidays side by side at work. 

Roughly one-fifth of the team has commemorated their commitment with corgi dog tattoos, a quirky badge of honor. 

As Nico puts it, “if you want to win and make a company people talk about for the next 100 years, you’re going to need to put in some work”. 

The hustle is paying off: with only ~70 employees, Corgi has achieved what some insurers take decades to do, thanks to automation and sheer force of will.

Stats 📊

Corgi has raised $108M at a $630M valuation led by Kindred Ventures with participation from Y Combinator, Contrary, Oliver Jung, SV Angel, Phosphor Capital, and others.

They report $40M+ ARR and insure 40,000+ customers across 49 states, with churn reported as sub 1%.

The team is about 70 people, and it owns 2 of roughly 200 carriers in its category, or about 1% by count.

(Oh, and they have one office corgi – the founders’ $16,000 dog – who occasionally makes appearances on Zoom calls!)

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The Opportunity 🚀

• 💡 Insurance is about 12% of US GDP, and startups at Corgi’s target size can spend $50,000+ per year on coverage.

• 📈 Corgi’s wedge is that it is rebuilding the core, not the interface. The source analogy is “rebuilding a skyscraper’s foundation while everyone else is painting the lobby.”

• 🚀 A competitor may need $50M and 6–12 months to even start operations, which makes “licensed + automated” a strong moat if Corgi keeps compounding speed.

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