At downtown San Francisco At the headquarters of Corgi, an AI insurance startup, most conference rooms have a mattress within the corner. There is a reason for this: the startup’s employees work within the office 7 days every week and sometimes need a spot to remain overnight. For CEO Nico Laqua, the routine is much more extreme. Most nights he sleeps in a room called the “Founders’ Room” and showers at a close-by Equinox gym. “Technically, I have a room [in an apartment] but I never really go there,” he says Forbes.
The space sits on the skinny line between tech startup and lived-in college dorm, filled with trash bags, worn-out furniture and the occasional stray banana peel. The air is stale, like at the tip of a 72-hour hackathon. The company’s mascot, a brown and white corgi named Trudy, is usually underfoot. The pet is co-owned by employees, who feed, walk and bathe it with the assistance of an AI bot on Telegram that reminds employees to finish the tasks. Downstairs, the startup owns and operates Corgi Café, an all-day coffeehouse open to the general public that has turn into a beacon for the town’s 20 or so startup founders, who work into the evening to satisfy product deadlines or close deals.
The scene is not quite what you’d expect from an insurance company, but as of late anything is feasible within the hectic world of AI startups, even those attempting to fix something as mundane as claims management.
And that is where the two-year-old Corgi tries to make cash by utilizing AI to create quotes for patrons, evaluate their workflows, after which set the costs for his insurance policies. It also uses AI to administer claims reasonably than sending them to groups of human adjusters, who often work overseas. Not only do they provide insurance for startups themselves, but additionally they enable startups to sell insurance to their very own customers. “AI agents talk to other AI agents to complete such tasks,” says Laqua.
“I didn’t know what VC or YC was before I came here.”
Bizarreness aside, the two-year-old company is finding its rhythm. Corgi already claims to generate around $100 million in annual revenue from 1000’s of startup customers including Deel, the HR and payroll startup; Artisan, the AI company that has turn into infamous in San Francisco for its billboards reading “Stop Hiring Humans”; and Eragon, an enterprise AI company. Corgi, for instance, insures Eragon within the emerging AI liability category, protecting the corporate from lawsuits when its AI models hallucinate or produce errors for patrons. It took lower than 24 hours to get an insurance quote, and the method was completely digital — without having to take calls from human representatives, says Josh Sirota, CEO of Eragon. “You understand what launch velocity is,” he says.
On Wednesday, Corgi announced a $160 million funding round led by growth equity firm TCV, giving the corporate unicorn status with a $1.3 billion valuation. On the identical day, Corgi launched a brand new service to insure long-haul truckers, but didn’t discover who its customers are.
As the son of a linguistics professor and an insurance company lawyer, you would possibly think that Laqua, who grew up in San Diego, was destined to launch an insurance startup. But at first he had other ideas. Laqua, 26, who learned to code as a toddler, began working on a social media app while studying at Columbia University. He sent it to his friend Emily Yuan, whom he met in startup circles, to Stanford to try it out. The two then co-founded an app called Picnic, which eventually grew right into a gaming company called Basket Entertainment. (The two were honored as Forbes 30 under 30 members for Basket in 2024).
It was a foul experience with an insurer while running Basket Entertainment that gave him the concept of returning to insurance. Once the insurer took too long to supply a price estimate, which put a vital contract in danger. Another time, the insurer refused to pay out a copyright claim that Laqua believed the corporate deserved. He thought there is perhaps a greater way. Two years ago, Laqua and Yuan left Basket to begin Corgi and enrolled in Y Combinator’s 2024 summer cohort.
“If you want to start a high-growth startup, if you’re trying to be an AI company that’s very serious and don’t work weekends, then you basically just give up.”
The opportunity is big: According to the Insurance Information Institute, the insurance market within the U.S. alone is $1.7 trillion. But there are also many long-established giants in addition to start-ups like Lemonade or Vouch Insurance. Perhaps that is why the co-founders went out of their technique to make their culture stand out. First is Trudy the Corgi. The pet doesn’t belong to an worker. Instead, employees take turns watching them, and if nobody has attended to them, the Telegram bot pings employees to remind them. Like any dog, she will be able to misbehave. Laqua says she sometimes disobeys a co-worker when one other gives her what she wants. “That’s part of the problem when you have a lot of owners,” he says. “She is very loved. She is very spoiled.”
Then there’s the 7 day week policy. The startup is not the just one pushing its employees beyond the traditional work week. Another San Francisco-based company called Arrowster, which helps students apply to review abroad programs, is working throughout the week. “Why is a week made up of seven days? If you think about it, there is no logical reason,” said CEO Kenneth Chong Forbes last 12 months. “There may be historical reasons, but why is it five days on and two days off?” Other high-profile corporations, resembling data labeling startup Mercor and AI customer support company Decagon, have also adopted 6-day workweeks. And after all, the culture of “996” — short for business hours of 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., 6 days every week — has historically permeated the culture of Chinese tech giants like Alibaba and ByteDance.
Laqua makes no apologies for his attitude. “If you want to start a high-growth startup, if you’re trying to be an AI company that’s very serious and don’t work on weekends, then you’re basically just quietly giving up,” Laqua says, using the slang for doing the bare minimum at work. “Because there’s someone who works these weekends.” Alexander Wortmann, the partner at TCV who led Corgi’s latest round, says the expectations for brand new hires are clear. “They know what their goal is and what they are committed to.”
Hence the Corgi Café, a monument to startup night owls. On a Tuesday evening in April at 8:30 p.m. there’s quite a lot of activity. Around 30 people, mostly young people and just about all of them with laptops, crowd into the intense room and sit at round picket tables. A person is on a Zoom call while one other types on Claude Code, Anthropic’s coding assistant. A lady sips a Chipotle cup while hunched over her computer.
One of the patrons, a 22-year-old named Laurence who founded a yet-to-be-launched social media startup, says there’s a troublesome entrepreneurial spirit in San Francisco immediately. “This cafe embodies that.” For one other customer, it was a crash course in startupology. “I didn’t know what VC or YC was before I came here,” says Iggy McGregor, a 20-year-old from London who’s studying psychology at a community college within the East Bay. He refers to “venture capital” and “Y Combinator,” the famous incubator for technology startups.
The cafe is losing money, Laqua says, but he claims it is not much (he doesn’t disclose margins) and believes the advantages in constructing community and recruiting customers and employees are value it. Startups can host events on the café, but must cover the associated fee of all food and drinks served. It also offers specialty drinks sponsored by tech corporations like Brexspresso from bank card startup Brex (ice, tonic water, double espresso shot and orange bitters) or The Qodo Brew from code review platform Qodo (ice, water and cold brew concentrate), in addition to “boosters” like collagen peptides and spirulina. Sometimes enterprise capitalists come in search of investors. The company also plans to open more cafes near its other offices, including in New York and Dallas – perhaps a great addition if the insurance aspect (just like the social media app) doesn’t pan out.
“We provide an important space where people who love technology, writing and working can stop and hang out,” he says. “I think there are a lot of downstream benefits that we probably can’t see.”
And Laqua makes an exaggerated promise to its customers. “Even if there is a fire that destroys the city, they will find my charred body behind the counter making coffee,” he jokes. “It literally never closes.”
Anna Tong contributed reporting.
