The Boring Trillion
Most founders chase what is loud. Karn Saroya chases what is large, slow, and stubbornly analog. Reinsurance - the financial backstop beneath the insurance you actually buy - is a market worth roughly a trillion dollars and still runs, in many corners, on PDF attachments and faxed cover notes. Saroya looked at that and saw an ocean. Then he set out to tokenize it.
Re, the company he co-founded and runs from San Francisco, is a decentralized reinsurance protocol built on Avalanche. It connects alternative capital - the patient, yield-hungry kind that lives on-chain - with insurance carriers who need balance-sheet support to write more risk. The thesis is contrarian in a way only an insurance person can fully appreciate. Crypto spent a decade looking for a yield that did not depend on the next round of speculation. Saroya's argument is that catastrophe premiums - the boring, actuarially priced cash flows that have been paying out in Bermuda for forty years - are exactly the kind of yield DeFi has been hunting for.
A Sequel, Not a Pivot
The shorthand version of Saroya's career goes: Queen's University, Oliver Wyman, MIT Sloan as a Fulbright Scholar, a fashion startup called Stylekick, a stint at Shopify, then the Y Combinator-backed insurtech Cover, and now Re. The honest version is messier and more interesting. Each chapter handed him a piece of the puzzle he is still putting together.
At Oliver Wyman, fresh from undergrad, he worked on stress-testing programs for banks and solvency models for insurers - the post-2008 plumbing nobody wanted to look at. It was the kind of work that bores most twenty-somethings into a different industry. It made Saroya the rare founder who finds underwriting genuinely fascinating.
Stylekick, a mobile fashion marketplace co-founded in 2013, taught him that consumer attention is brutal. Shopify, where he landed in product, taught him what infrastructure looks like when it works. Then in 2016 he co-founded Cover with a thought experiment: what if buying property insurance felt as quick as taking a photograph? The first prototype was built in 48 hours during a Y Combinator weekend. Customers liked it. Investors liked it. Saroya kept it going for six years.
The Quiet Wind-Down
In 2022, Cover was wound down. There was no scandal, no public drama, no carcass. Just a clear-eyed conclusion that the consumer insurance stack - regulated, capital-intensive, distribution-heavy - did not bend the way he wanted it to. Most founders would have tried again at a different layer of the same business. Saroya went deeper. If consumer insurance was a leaky bucket, the bucket's bucket was reinsurance, and that was the layer he wanted to rebuild.
Why Avalanche, Why Now
Re raised $14 million in seed funding to launch, with backers who tend to write checks into the gap between traditional finance and crypto. The capital stack expanded again in 2024, when Re debuted its first tokenized reinsurance fund on Avalanche, anchored by a $15 million commitment from the crypto-native mutual Nexus Mutual. Total funding now sits around $21 million.
The choice of Avalanche is not aesthetic. Saroya wanted subnets - permissioned execution environments that can keep underwriting data private from the broader chain while still allowing on-chain settlement. Reinsurance contracts involve trade secrets, regulator-sensitive disclosures, and the kind of legal language that does not want to be in a public blockstream. Subnets let Re thread the needle: composable enough to attract DeFi capital, private enough to satisfy a Bermudian regulator at 9 a.m. on a Tuesday.
The Lloyd's Comparison
Saroya does not shy away from the loudest analogy in the room. He has called Re "a decentralized Lloyd's of London at its highest level," and the comparison is more useful than it first sounds. Lloyd's, founded in a coffeehouse in 1688, exists because risk-bearing capital needs a syndicate structure to function. Names commit funds. Underwriters write policies. A market clears. Saroya's bet is that the syndicate structure can be re-implemented in smart contracts, with the capital coming from anyone on earth who wants exposure to catastrophe yield, and the underwriting still done by licensed humans who know what a hurricane does to a portfolio.
It is a slow market to disrupt. Lloyd's has 336 years of legal and regulatory inertia behind it. Saroya talks about Re in time horizons that match. He is not racing to a Series B announcement. He is laying capital pipes that he hopes will move premiums in 2035.
Personality, Briefly
Saroya is punchy in conversation. Interviewers come away with one or two soundbites that sound media-trained and turn out, on inspection, to be a worldview he has been polishing for a decade. He uses the word "machinery" a lot. He uses the word "ocean" more than you would expect.
He is also patient in a way that is rare among crypto founders. While most of his on-chain peers chased airdrops and TVL screenshots, Re spent two quiet years building actuarial models, hiring reinsurance veterans, and getting regulators comfortable. The first headlines came later. The first product came later still. He seems entirely fine with that.
What He's Reaching For
Ask Saroya what success looks like and he will not answer in unicorn valuations. He talks about the share of global reinsurance premium that flows through transparent on-chain rails. He talks about a future where a pension fund in Singapore can underwrite a sliver of a Florida wind portfolio at 11 p.m. and settle by sunrise. He talks about taking an industry that has hidden its math behind broker relationships and exposing the actuarial truth to anyone who wants to read a smart contract.
It is an ambition large enough to sound naive when written down. The check sizes behind it, and the resumes he has hired against it, suggest otherwise.
The Long Game
Saroya is Canadian, San Franciscan, MIT-educated, and conspicuously unbothered by the cyclicality of the space he works in. When crypto winters arrived, he kept building. When the insurtech wave receded, he kept building. The throughline is not blockchain or insurance or Avalanche specifically. The throughline is a stubborn interest in the parts of finance that nobody else wants to read about.
Most founders sell a story about themselves first and a product second. Saroya tends to do it backwards. The product comes with charts. The story comes only if you ask. Watch the charts.