At age 12, Sondre Rasch was running a web hosting company. Not from a garage in Silicon Valley. From Bergen, Norway - through a browser window, with people he had only ever met inside a browser window. He had found his business partners inside a multiplayer game called Planetarion, learned PHP and server administration without a teacher, and eventually sold the customer base to a local ISP. That company was called SolidHost.
That origin tells you something the LinkedIn bio does not. He wasn't drawn to startups by the money. He was drawn to the thing the internet makes possible: building real things with real people you have never physically met, across borders that do not apply online.
He went on to serve as a sniper in the Norwegian Army, study economics at the Norwegian School of Economics (NHH) in Bergen and take coursework at UC Berkeley, and then spend time as a policy advisor to the Government of Norway - working on exactly the kind of social safety net infrastructure that his home country is famous for. Norway's welfare model is one of the most comprehensive in the world. He absorbed how it worked from the inside.
The direct line from Norwegian civil servant to Y Combinator CEO runs through a company called Superside. Rasch co-founded the freelance design platform (then called Consus) with a college friend, took it through Y Combinator's W16 batch, and watched it grow to nearly 1,000 employees. While building Superside's distributed workforce, he ran into the problem that would become his life's work: the freelancers and remote workers building the product had no safety net. No portable insurance. No pension. No disability coverage. The employment infrastructure of the 20th century was simply absent for 21st-century work.
In early 2016, the insight crystallized so sharply he couldn't sleep. The problem was enormous. The solution was structurally available. No one was building it at scale. He left Superside on good terms with his co-founder, gathered Sarah Sandnes (CTO) and Hans Kjellby (COO) - both from Norway's policy world - and built SafetyWing. They brought it to Y Combinator's W18 batch, making Rasch one of the rare founders to go through YC twice with two different companies.
SafetyWing launched with Nomad Insurance - affordable travel medical coverage priced for people who live outside a single country's system. The product was designed to work the way a digital nomad actually lives: pay monthly, cancel anytime, covered while crossing borders. The company later added Remote Health for nomads and Remote Health for distributed companies, giving employers a way to cover contractors and employees in 180+ countries through a single platform.
By April 2022, SafetyWing had closed a $35M Series B led by Kinnevik - bringing total funding to $46.6M. The company was generating $34.1M in annual revenue by 2024, serving tens of thousands of customers through a team of 150 people distributed across 60+ countries. That team itself operates with a deliberate structural choice: equal salaries regardless of location. An engineer in San Francisco earns the same as an engineer in Lagos. It is a policy statement dressed as an HR policy.
The insurance products are the revenue engine. But they are not the endgame. The endgame is Project Plumia - a volunteer-driven initiative Rasch launched to design what he calls "a country on the internet." A digital nation with its own passport, portable welfare system, and social infrastructure. The philosophical blueprint comes partly from David Deutsch's book The Beginning of Infinity, which gave SafetyWing its core company value: "all problems are solvable." The implementation is less abstract. An MVP nomad border pass was in development as of 2024.
He hosts the Building Remotely podcast, interviewing founders building distributed companies. He is influenced by Paul Graham, Sam Altman, and the rationalist writer Eliezer Yudkowsky, whose blog he encountered at age 12. He validated ideas by crossing multiple types of reasoning - economics, game theory, and idealistic vision - because he believes the public discourse is "a rollercoaster of fashion" that is structurally bad at identifying what is real.
His favorite places to work from are Bali, Tulum, and Tuscany. He once helped run a political campaign in Bergen that won 9 city council seats. The thread connecting all of it is the same: systems, scale, and freedom of movement - and the persistent belief that the problem of "what happens to you when your country's borders stop mattering" is a problem worth solving properly, at a global level, right now.
