This AI Insurance Company With An All-Night Cafe And Cheeky Corgi Is Now A Unicorn – Forbes
At the downtown San Francisco headquarters of Corgi, an AI insurance startup, most conference rooms have a mattress tucked into the corner. There’s a reason for that: the startup’s employees work 7 days a week in the office and sometimes they need a place to crash. For CEO Nico Laqua, the routine is even more extreme. Most nights, he sleeps in a room called the “Founders’ Room” and showers at a nearby Equinox gym. “I technically have a room [in an apartment] but I never really go there,” he tells Forbes.
The space occupies the thin line between tech startup and lived-in frat house, cluttered with bags of trash, well-worn furniture and the occasional stray banana peel. The air is stale, like at the end of a 72-hour hackathon. The company’s mascot, a brown and white corgi named Trudy, is often underfoot. The pet is collectively owned by employees, who feed, walk and bathe her with the help of an AI bot on Telegram that reminds employees to carry out the tasks. Downstairs, the startup owns and operates the Corgi Cafe, an all-night coffee house that’s open to the public, which has become a beacon for the city’s set of 20-something startup founders who work until twilight trying to hit product deadlines or close deals.
The scene is not quite what you’d expect from an insurance company, but these days anything goes in the intense, frenzied world of AI startups, even those trying to fix something as banal as managing claims.
And that’s exactly where two-year-old Corgi is trying to cash in, using AI to generate quotes for clients, evaluating their workflows, then pricing its insurance policies. It also uses AI to manage claims, instead of sending them to teams of human evaluators that are often working overseas. In addition to providing insurance for startups themselves, they also allow startups to sell insurance to their own customers. “AI agents are talking to other AI agents in order to do these sorts of tasks,” says Laqua.
“I didn’t know what VC or YC was before I started coming here.”
Quirkiness aside, the two-year-old company is finding its groove. Already Corgi claims to have annualized revenue around $100 million from thousands of startup customers, including Deel, the HR and payroll startup; Artisan, the AI company that has become infamous in San Francisco for its “stop hiring humans” billboards; and Eragon, an enterprise AI company. Corgi, for example, insures Eragon in the burgeoning category of “AI liability,” protecting the company against lawsuits if its AI models hallucinate or produce errors for clients. It took less than 24 hours to get a policy quote, and the process was all digital — without having to take calls from human reps, says Josh Sirota, CEO of Eragon. “They understand what startup speed is,” he says.
On Wednesday, Corgi announced a $160 million funding round, led by the growth equity firm TCV, vaulting the company to unicorn status at a $1.3 billion valuation. That same day, Corgi launched a new service providing insurance for long-haul truckers, though it didn’t name who its customers are.
The son of a linguistics professor and an attorney for an insurance company, you might think Laqua, who grew up in San Diego, was preordained to found an insurance startup. But he initially had other ideas. Laqua, 26, who learned to code as a kid, began working on a social media app while attending Columbia University. He sent it to his friend Emily Yuan, who he met through startup circles, at Stanford to test out. The two then became cofounders of the app, called Picnic, which would eventually morph into a gaming company called Basket Entertainment. (The two were honored as Forbes 30 Under 30 members for Basket in 2024).
It was a bad experience with an insurer while running Basket Entertainment that gave him the idea to circle back to insurance. One time, the insurer took too long with a quote and it jeopardized an important contract. Another time, the insurer refused to pay out a copyright claim that Laqua felt the company deserved. He thought there could be a better way. So two years ago, Laqua and Yuan left Basket to found Corgi and enrolled in Y Combinator’s 2024 summer cohort.
“If you’re going to be a hyper growth startup, if you’re trying to be an AI company that’s very serious, and you’re not working weekends, you’re basically just ‘quiet-quitting.’”
The opportunity is massive: the market for insurance in the U.S. alone is $1.7 trillion, according to the Insurance Information Institute. But it’s also crowded with legacy giants, as well as startups like Lemonade or Vouch Insurance. Perhaps that’s why the cofounders have gone out of their way to stand out with their culture. First is Trudy the Corgi. The pet doesn’t belong to any one employee. Instead, employees take turns watching her, and if no one has tended to her, the Telegram bot pings employees to remind them. Like any dog, she can misbehave. Laqua says she’ll sometimes disobey one employee if another will give her what she wants. “That’s a bit of the problem of having many owners,” he says. “She’s very beloved. She’s very spoiled.”
Then there is its 7-days-a-week policy. The startup isn’t alone in pushing its employees beyond the standard work week. Another San Francisco-based company called Arrowster, which helps students apply to study abroad programs, works all week long. “Why is a week seven days? If you think about it, there’s no logical reason,” CEO Kenneth Chong told Forbes last year. “There might be historical reasons, but why is it five days working and two days off?” Other high-flying companies, like data labeling startup Mercor and AI customer service company Decagon, have embraced 6-day work weeks as well. And of course, a culture of “996” — short for business hours from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., 6 days a week — has historically permeated the culture at Chinese tech giants like Alibaba and ByteDance.
Laqua makes no apologies for his stance. “If you’re going to be a hyper growth startup, if you’re trying to be an AI company that’s very serious, and you’re not working weekends, you’re basically just ‘quiet-quitting,’” Laqua says, using slang for doing the bare minimum at work. “Because there’s someone that will work those weekends.” Alexander Wortmann, the partner at TCV who led Corgi’s latest round, says the expectation is clear for new hires. “They know what the ambition is and what they’re signing up for.”
Hence the Corgi Cafe, a monument to startup all-nighters. At 8:30 p.m. on a Tuesday night in April, it’s buzzing. About 30 people, mostly young and almost everyone with a laptop, pack the well-lit room, sitting at round wooden tables. One man is on a Zoom call, while another taps away on Claude Code, Anthropic’s coding assistant. One woman sips from a Chipotle cup while hunched over her computer.
One patron, a 22-year-old named Laurence who founded a still-unlaunched social media startup, says there’s a gritty, entrepreneurial spirit to San Francisco right now. “This cafe embodies that.” For another customer, it’s been a crash course in startupology. “I didn’t know what VC or YC was before I started coming here,” says Iggy McGregor, a 20-year-old from London studying psychology at a community college in the East Bay. He’s referring to “venture capital” and “Y Combinator,” the famous tech startup incubator.
The cafe loses money, Laqua says, but he claims it’s not much (he won’t disclose the margins), and thinks it’s worth the benefits in community building and recruiting customers and employees. Startups can host events at the cafe, but must cover the cost of all the food and drinks served. It also offers specialty drinks sponsored by tech companies, like the Brexspresso, from the credit card startup Brex (ice, tonic water, double espresso shot and orange bitters) or The Qodo Brew, from the code review platform Qodo (ice, water and cold brew concentrate), as well as “boosters” like collagen peptides and spirulina. Venture capitalists sometimes stop by to try to trawl for investment takers. The company plans to open more cafes near its other offices as well, including in New York and Dallas — perhaps a good back up if the insurance angle (like the social media app) doesn’t pan out.
“We’re providing an important space where people who love technology, love writing, love working, can stop and hang out,” he says. “I think there’s a lot of downstream benefits that we probably can’t realize.”
And to its patrons, Laqua makes one hyperbolic promise. “Even if there’s a fire that’s destroying the city, they’ll find my charred body making coffees behind the counter,” he jokes. “It literally will never shut.”
Anna Tong contributed reporting.
