She sells you plumbing you can't see - and can't run insurance without.
Two MIT degrees, one insurance obsession. Melgiri co-founded CoverWallet, sold it to Aon, then got annoyed enough by a runaway email chain to build Functional Finance - the platform teaching insurance how to move money in real time.
Rashmi "Rush" Melgiri
The Assignment
Somewhere inside the insurance industry right now, a person is on an email chain trying to find money. Not a lot of money - a commission here, a ceded premium there. But the money is real, the spreadsheet is stale, and the reconciliation is done by hand.
Rashmi Melgiri has decided that person should not exist. As co-founder and CEO of Functional Finance, she is building the financial operations platform for insurance - the layer that automates billing, premium collection, payables, premium finance, and the endless matching of invoices to payments. The pitch is deceptively boring: make the back office run itself. The consequence is not. Money that used to sit in limbo starts moving in real time.
Functional Finance launched in 2021, co-founded with technology executive Tony DeGangi. Its customers are the operators of insurance - the MGAs, wholesalers, brokers, and carriers whose businesses run on money changing hands correctly, on time, at scale. The company's ambition is to become the authoritative source of truth for policy financial data across that entire value chain. In plain terms: if a dollar moves in insurance, Functional Finance wants to be the system that knows where it went.
The market seems to agree it is a problem worth solving. In September 2024 the company closed a $20 million Series A led by Walkabout Ventures, with Munich Re Ventures and Phil Edmundson - the founder behind Corvus Insurance - joining in. That followed an $8 million seed round backed by an unusually blue-chip roster for a back-office startup: NEA, Altai Ventures, Walkabout, and Hank Greenberg's Starr Insurance. Total raised to date: around $36 million. The growth number the company likes to cite is the one that turns heads - premium payment volume up more than 2,500% in a single year.
If you're not solving customers' problems, you don't have a company.
The Origin
Most founder myths start with a lightning bolt. Melgiri's starts with a decision. "It's also fine to decide you want to be an entrepreneur, and then find the idea," she has said. "That's how CoverWallet was born." It is a quietly radical thing to admit - that the commitment came before the concept - and it explains a career that keeps circling back to the same instinct: find the plumbing nobody wants to fix.
Before insurance, she was a strategy consultant at Altman Vilandrie & Company, working across technology, media, and telecom. Then, in 2016, came CoverWallet. The question that animated it was almost naive: payroll, benefits, accounting, time-tracking - every other back-office chore had gone self-serve and online for small business owners. So why not commercial insurance? CoverWallet set out to modernize a $100 billion market, and Melgiri, as COO, did something founders rarely do. She became the company's first licensed insurance advisor. She sold the product herself before asking anyone else to.
The recognition followed the work. TechCrunch put her among 42 women in tech who "crushed it" in 2017. Crain's tapped her for its 40 Under 40 in 2018.
CoverWallet was acquired by Aon in 2020, and Melgiri stayed on to keep building inside the giant. Which is exactly where the next idea found her. Managing the back office post-acquisition, she kept ending up on long email chains, hunting for money as it moved between companies. Nobody could see it clearly. Everybody was reconciling by hand. The frustration was specific, repetitive, and - to an economist - obviously fixable.
So she did the thing she does. She left to build the fix. "When I started Functional Finance, I wasn't an insurance newbie," she has said. "The pace of traction has been so much faster than it was at CoverWallet given the expertise of the team we've built and the clear vision." Act two, moving faster than act one.
Off the Record
She met Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan as a high schooler, after her team placed top-four nationally in a Fed economics competition in 1999. The economics obsession started early.
Two MIT degrees - a bachelor's in Economics and an MBA from MIT Sloan. She never really left the numbers.
Her friends and colleagues call her "Rush." The name fits a founder whose second company is outrunning her first.
She was CoverWallet's first licensed insurance advisor - a co-founder who literally sold policies before scaling the sales team.
Her back-office startup drew investors most fintechs would envy: Munich Re, Starr Insurance, NEA, and Corvus founder Phil Edmundson.
In Her Words
"CoverWallet taught me to listen intently to customers. They are really the only thing that matters."
On customers"The problems we are working on are so complex that we have to have the best minds working on them collaboratively."
On teams"Insurance is one of the foundational components of running a small business. Why isn't it available in a self-serve, online way?"
On CoverWallet"It's fine to decide you want to be an entrepreneur, and then find the idea. That's how CoverWallet was born."
On starting upWatch
A conversation with the CoverWallet co-founder on building in insurance, finding the idea, and why the boring problems are the ones worth chasing.
The goal is simple: if a dollar moves in insurance, be the system that knows where it went.