Insurance runs on paper, phone tag, and trust that is hard to verify. Tolga Tezel spent a weekend building a different way, and then a few years turning it into infrastructure that thousands of agencies now rely on.
The idea did not arrive in a boardroom. It arrived at dinner. A friend's mother, who owned an insurance agency, was describing the odd, analog reality of her job. To help clients understand what they were covered for, she sometimes had to drive to their homes and dig through their policy documents in person. The information existed, but it was locked away behind logins, PDFs, and habit.
Tezel, an engineer by training, kept turning the problem over. Consumers could already connect their bank accounts to a budgeting app in seconds. Why should insurance be any different? Over a single weekend he built a prototype that let a person share their full insurance profile in about twenty seconds - policies, coverages, limits, deductibles, the whole picture.
What happened next says a lot about how he works. Instead of polishing the demo in private, he took his laptop into insurance offices and showed it to whoever would look. The reaction was consistent. Agents told him that gathering accurate information from prospects and customers felt like "pulling teeth." From 2019 onward he interviewed hundreds of agencies, and the same complaint kept surfacing. The data was the bottleneck, not the selling.
From Dropbox to insurance
Tezel's path to insurance was not a straight line. He grew up in the Canadian tech-and-engineering track, studying electrical engineering at the University of Waterloo, where he packed in six co-op internships before graduating. One of those internships, at an insurtech startup back in 2011, first pulled him toward startups. Another job, at a company later acquired by Dropbox, brought him from Canada to California.
At Dropbox and later at the fintech company Nova Credit, he learned two things that would define Canopy Connect. The first was a near-obsessive respect for security and privacy. The second was a conviction that consumers, given the right tools, can use their own data to get better outcomes. Nova Credit was built on exactly that premise for immigrants and credit; Tezel came to believe insurance deserved the same treatment.
As an infrastructure company, our role is to make it easy for consumers and businesses to share insurance data with the businesses they choose. Tolga Tezel
The discipline of trust
There is an obvious temptation for any company sitting on top of valuable data: sell it, or sell insurance on the side. Tezel has refused both. Canopy Connect does not sell insurance and does not sell data, a deliberate choice to avoid the conflicts of interest that would quietly erode the thing the whole business depends on. For an infrastructure company, trust is not a marketing line. It is the product.
That instinct shows up in the unglamorous details. In November 2021, Canopy Connect became the first in its category to complete a SOC 2 audit, a security review most young startups postpone. Tezel, shaped by his years at Dropbox and Nova Credit, built security and privacy into the foundation rather than bolting it on later.
The same discipline governed how he raised money. After an initial seed round, Tezel pushed the company to become "default alive" - sustainable on its own terms - before going out for more capital. When he did raise a $6.5 million Series A in 2023, he was raising from strength rather than scrambling to survive.
Hiring, and getting out of the way
Ask Tezel about his most important asset and he points at the team. His hiring standard is stubborn: he does not trade quality for speed, even when speed would be convenient. What he offers in return is unusual latitude. He talks about giving people real ownership, competitive pay, unlimited time off, and the space to make decisions without a manager hovering.
We believe in hiring great people and then giving them the space to excel. Tolga Tezel
He describes his own role in the sharpest possible terms - both the company's "harshest critic" and its "fiercest advocate." The rhythm he has built around that is deliberately simple: weekly reviews of the numbers, monthly retrospectives, and a habit of pulling the whole team into the decisions that matter.
Betting on connected insurance
Under the hood, Canopy Connect is tackling a genuinely hard technical problem: normalizing property and casualty insurance data across every U.S. carrier, each of which represents the same information differently. Get it right and an agent can send a link, have a client sign in to their carrier, and receive a clean, structured profile in seconds. The platform now connects with more than 300 carriers and covers the vast majority of the auto and homeowners markets.
Tezel frames the bigger picture through the lens of open banking. Around the world, consumers won the right to control and share their financial data, and an entire ecosystem grew on top of it. He sees connected insurance as the same kind of inevitability - a shift in how people manage their financial identity that is a question of when, not if. His near-term roadmap follows that logic: an all-in-one insurance intake platform, and Policy Stream, a unified API and dashboard for automating renewals, cancellations, servicing, and retention.
Five years on from those first laptop demos in San Francisco, the pitch has not really changed. Consumers want insurance that is personalized, seamless, and easy. Carriers want better data to write better risks. Tezel is still building the pipes in between - quietly, carefully, and without selling anyone's information along the way.
Canopy Connect is the fastest way to collect verified insurance information from a potential client. Tolga Tezel