A startup shut down in March 2023. Most people read the headline and moved on. Laura Speyer wrote a check and took over the keyboard.
Catch is a benefits marketplace for people who don't have a benefits department. Health, dental, vision - chosen, applied for, and enrolled in through one place built for the self-employed. Laura Speyer is its co-CEO, and the thing worth knowing first is that she bought it rather than built it.
In early 2023 the original Catch went dark. Founders Kristen Anderson and Andrew Ambrosino had run it as a health-and-retirement platform for gig workers, then closed the doors. Speyer and Alexa Irish, two former colleagues from CLEAR, were quietly working on their own insurance startup at the time. When they saw Catch was shutting down, they didn't compete with the ghost. They acquired it - with their own money - and carried the mission and the technical platform forward.
"We're now able to carry forward the mission as well as the technical platform," Speyer said of the deal. "We're just super impressed with what they built." It is a strange sentence for a CEO to say about the product she runs, and it tells you exactly how she thinks: the work that already exists is worth more than the ego of starting from scratch.
The relaunch was timed with surgical intent - November 1, the start of open enrollment, the one window of the year when health insurance is actually top of mind for the people Catch serves. The product reopened leaner than before: retirement benefits were dropped, and the focus narrowed to health, dental, and vision, sold through partnerships with insurers and the federal exchange at healthcare.gov.
Speyer describes the company less as an insurer and more as a stand-in for the thing freelancers don't get: a personalized HR department. The friendly experts who help you get corporate-style benefits without the corporate job. It's a pitch aimed squarely at the roughly 60 million Americans who work independently and discover, the hard way, that nobody is enrolling them in anything.
We're now able to carry forward the mission as well as the technical platform.- Laura Speyer, on acquiring Catch
Read her career as a steady trade-up into harder problems. Each stop hands over more of a stranger's life: their money, then their identity, then their health coverage.
KKR. She came up through one of the most demanding rooms in finance - the private equity firm where deals are won on detail.
CLEAR. Corporate development, strategy, and growth at the identity company you know from the airport line. This is where she met Alexa Irish.
The leap. She and Irish leave CLEAR and start building their own insurance startup for independent workers - and immediately run into how hard benefits are when you're on your own.
The acquisition. Catch shuts down. Speyer and Irish buy it, become co-CEOs, and relaunch in time for the November open enrollment.
The alliance. Catch partners with the Freelancers Union to widen access and publishes an open enrollment guide built for independent workers.
When she left corporate life, Speyer hit the same wall her customers do: getting decent benefits on your own is brutal. The company is the answer she needed.
Faced with a shuttered startup, she didn't out-compete it - she bought the platform and the mission whole. Pragmatism over pride.
She and Irish used their own money to acquire Catch. There's no easier way to align a CEO with a customer than spending your own cash on the bet.
Catch's framing is human: be the helpful expert a freelancer never gets to hire. Corporate-style coverage, no corporate job required.
The relaunch landed on the first day of open enrollment - the only week the product truly matters - not a random press date.
The Freelancers Union partnership shows the instinct: grow by joining the institutions independent workers already trust.
Catch and Freelancers Union share a common goal of supporting freelancers and independent workers.- Laura Speyer
Her resume is a tour of trust: money at KKR, identity at CLEAR, health coverage at Catch. People keep handing her the most sensitive parts of their lives.
The Yale credential is a flex of efficiency - a Bachelor of Arts and a Master of Arts, earned simultaneously.
She and her co-CEO were colleagues first. Same company, same desk-adjacency at CLEAR, before they became business partners.
Health insurance for gig workers is littered with failed startups. She walked into that graveyard on purpose - and picked one back up.