
At 16, he taught himself to write the software for his grandfather’s insurance business. Four decades later, the harder job is making sure the answers don’t all live in his head.
A drone policy can be small. The work behind it can be enormous. Dyad builds software for the handoffs that decide whether insurance growth pays.

Before digital payments became a boardroom slogan, Chris Farfaras was explaining the plumbing of premium finance. Three decades later, his work still turns on the same quiet question: how do you make paying for insurance feel simple?
Input 1 began with a teenager, a programming book and a family insurance business. Four decades later, its unglamorous specialty - helping insurance companies collect, reconcile and finance premiums - offers a useful playbook for building durable vertical software.
Rashmi 'Rush' Melgiri is the co-founder and CEO of Functional Finance, a San Francisco insurtech building the financial operations platform that automates billing, premium collection, reconciliation, and money movement for insurance operators. An MIT-trained economist, she previously co-founded and ran operations at CoverWallet, the commercial insurance startup acquired by Aon in 2020. She started Functional Finance in 2021 after living the pain of chasing money across email chains inside the insurance back office, and has since raised $36M, including a $20M Series A led by Walkabout Ventures, while growing premium payment volume more than 2,500% year over year.
Functional Finance is a San Francisco-based insurtech building the financial operations (FinOps) platform for the insurance industry. Its API-driven software automates billing, invoicing, premium collection, premium finance, payables, commissions, treasury and reconciliation for managing general agents (MGAs), wholesalers and carriers - replacing spreadsheets and manual data entry with near real-time, policy-aware money movement. Founded in 2021 by CoverWallet alumni, the company raised a $20M Series A in 2024 on the back of a 2,500% year-over-year jump in premium payment volume.