Nicolas Laqua

Nico Laqua serves as the CEO and CTO of Corgi Insurance, a San Francisco-based full-stack insurance carrier founded in 2024 that provides commercial insurance products for startup and technology companies. Laqua co-founded Corgi alongside Emily Yuan in 2024, and the company participated in Y Combinator's Summer 2024 batch. Corgi received regulatory approval to operate as a licensed insurance carrier in July 2025. The company operates as a full-stack, AI-native insurance carrier that owns the full stack from underwriting to claims to reinsurance, instead of acting like a broker.

Laqua earned a BS in Neuroscience from Columbia University where he was a Rabi Scholar (top 10ish STEM students at Columbia). He worked on computational biology, AI, and VR from 2018-2020. Prior to founding Corgi Insurance, Laqua founded and served as CEO of Basket Entertainment, a gaming publisher, which he led from approximately 2020 to 2024. Basket grew into a gaming publisher with 35+ games and 200M monthly active users, with $6M revenue reported in 2023.

Laqua grew up in San Diego, California, and before Corgi spent time in startup hacker communities developing apps. The inspiration for Corgi came from Nico's family connection to insurance, his father spent his career as a lawyer for USAA, and when ChatGPT 3.5 arrived, Nico saw insurance as the biggest words-based industry that could finally be automated by computers that understand language. He had negative personal experience with insurance when he needed to get coverage for his last company, where a $60,000 policy was prohibitively expensive given his $1,000-$2,000 monthly income, and the process took several weeks with slow broker communication.

Career History

• CEO/CTO at Corgi Insurance (2024–present)
• CEO of Basket Entertainment (2020–2024)
• Computational biology research and AI/VR work (2018–2020)

What Nico Laqua could bring to Corgi Insurance CEO and co-founder role: Laqua brings entrepreneurial hustle honed through scaling Basket Entertainment to 200M users, technical depth with a neuroscience degree and AI background, and intimate knowledge of startup pain points in acquiring insurance. His vision leverages modern AI and compute-native infrastructure to rebuild legacy insurance, an industry representing 12% of GDP, by eliminating intermediaries, reducing friction, and offering modular coverage tailored to how technology companies actually operate. His approach to scaling through regulatory compliance as a moat rather than viewing it as an obstacle demonstrates sophisticated business acumen beyond typical insurtech plays.

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