Business insurance start-up Corgi completed its USD 160 million Series B on May 6. The round, led by American investment firm TCV, valued the venture at USD 1.3 billion, according to Corgi’s co-founder, Nico Laqua’s LinkedIn statement.
The Fourth batch successfully raised its 108 million Series A. Laqua said that by accumulating funding worth USD 268 million to date, Corgi has become Y Combinator’s latest unicorn.
Corgi’s co-founders, Laqua and Emily Yuan, were part of YC’s Spring 2024 batch. The start-up, established in the same year, offers coverage for general liability, cyber liability, tech and AI liability. The venture now wants to use the funding raised from its Series B to expand into more lines of insurance while building a generational company.
Building Thoughtful Insurance Products
According to Corgi, most insurance providers don’t sell their own policies or coverages, which means they also do not pay out their customers’ claims out of the companies’ pockets. This type of insurance is slower because they have to connect with a third-party financial entity to pay out claims. The start-up has disrupted the practice by emerging as an AI-native, full-stack insurance company that creates and sells its own policies, in addition to paying out customers’ claims when an issue arises. These elements, leveraged with AI, allow us to provide cheaper, better, and faster insurance for everyone.
“Our goal is to rebuild the USD 1 trillion-plus insurance industry from the ground up. We’re not just making a company; we’re engineering financial infrastructure for the next hundred years,” the start-up said.
As an AI-native, full-stack insurance company, Corgi has specialised itself in providing insurance to start-ups through scalable packages and customisable coverage solutions.
Every start-up, at its pre-revenue or seed stage, requires basic compliance to hire or lease space. Corgi’s answer to this is “Pre-Seed & Seed”, which addresses expenses related to office leases and initial hiring. This package provides foundational “General Liability and Business Property” coverage to protect against everyday operational risks. Tailored for business founders looking to meet landlord requirements and protect their initial assets while staying lean.
Next is “Series A”, which has been designed for high-growth tech companies. The package, apart from scaling with the start-ups’ funding rounds, also includes Directors & Officers (D&O) Insurance (a requirement for most Series A boards) and Tech E&O / Cyber Liability to satisfy enterprise vendor contracts and SOC 2 compliance standards.
For the growth stage, Corgi’s most comprehensive commercial insurance bundle offers high-limit protection, including Employment Practices Liability (EPLI) for large-scale hiring and fiduciary liability for employee benefit plans. The plan mitigates complex risks across multiple jurisdictions and ensures the companies remain “IPO-ready” with advanced management liability.
The “Custom Package” allows a start-up to tailor its coverage limits and policy types to specific industry risks. Whether the business needs specialised “AI Liability”, “Media Liability”, or specific international coverage, Corgi’s advisors help them build a bespoke risk management strategy that fits their exact contract requirements.
Solutions For Industries
Among its prominent insurance products for industries, let’s start with “Industry for SaaS”, tailored for companies facing digital risks that require software-oriented modern liability coverage. Through the mechanism, SaaS (Software as a Service) can meet insurance requirements in enterprise MSAs (Master Service Agreements), apart from gaining investor trust by providing the protection required for the company’s Series A term sheet and board. The insurance also protects its customers from incidents like system-wide outages, bugs, or implementation failures by reducing the monetary fallout.
For AI start-ups, Corgi’s insurance mechanism provides protection against scenarios like model performance and hallucination (liability for when an LLM provides false, defamatory, or harmful information that causes a third party loss), algorithmic bias (protection against claims of discriminatory outcomes in hiring, lending, or healthcare AI) and training data disputes (legal defence for intellectual property disputes related to the data used to train your proprietary models).
Next in line is “Fintech Insurance”, which blends risks like technology performance, multiple partner and stakeholder expectations, and regulatory scrutiny. A bug in your API prevents users from accessing features, balances, or transactions—partners and customers demand answers fast. Fintechs face constant worries like mistakes in payment routing, reporting, or product configuration, leading to allegations of customer harm or operational losses, with either customers, banks, processors or vendors knocking on companies’ doors with their monetary claims. Corgi acts like a shield in these situations by providing coverage against scenarios like professional liability arising from technology products or services; claims arising due to hacking, ransomware, and data privacy-related incidents; and risks associated with content, advertising, and intellectual property.
Also, “Marketplace Startup Insurance” from Corgi acts as the comprehensive insurance for two-sided marketplaces and platforms by protecting client platforms and their users and ensuring company growth from seed to IPO.
The insurance has three coverage areas: protection for claims involving bodily injury or property damage connected to platform-facilitated transactions, liability allegations tied to screening, verification, onboarding, or moderation workflows and claims tied to outages, ranking changes, listing errors, payment flow issues, or other product failures that impact users.