Hey HN! We’re Max and Gabriel the co-founders of Coverage Cat. We’ve been friends for over a decade, met in college then hung out mostly on the internet. We love building products that help people optimize the crufty corners of their lives. Max is a former Google/Microsoft/Two Sigma PM and Gabriel has been working in startups for over a decade.
We’re building Coverage Cat: a licensed insurance brokerage that helps you compare umbrella and home coverage side by side — with straight pricing, no sold leads, and a real broker on the other end. Our current focus is helping tech folks (think L3-L8) buy umbrella insurance.
Coverage Cat pairs AI-guided intake with a licensed brokerage team, so you can size up coverage, see honest price ranges, and compare real carrier options without handing your details to five agents overnight. Folks who use personal AI agents (think Muse, Instinct, Town, Openclaw, etc.) can drive the same flow through the Agent API/MCP.
We’d love your feedback so please do try it out. Just feed the prompt: “Shop for umbrella insurance with Coverage Cat” to your personal agent and let us know what you think!
If you want to watch a couple of agents navigate the flow before you use it there’s a video here: https://youtu.be/1BUkgAn6s-I
For those who are unfamiliar with this type of coverage, here’s a blurb from one of our insurance agents: “Umbrella liability insurance is a policy that provides additional coverage above the limits of existing auto, homeowners, renters, or landlord policies. It kicks in after the underlying policy limits are exhausted and may also cover personal injury claims like libel, slander, or defamation that standard policies often exclude. Policies typically start at $1 million in additional liability coverage and can protect you, your spouse, dependents, and even pets in your household.”
Buying insurance online is a miserable experience. You fill out a bunch of forms that say they’re going to give you quotes. Most don’t and then you end up with tons of unwanted phone calls and spam. Even if you wade through the muck, you’ll often still end up with sub-optimal prices and coverage because of a lack of market transparency and poorly-aligned advisory incentives.
We came to this problem because Max is a classic personal finance obsessive. He's the type of person that needs to know that he has the best possible price for something (everyone has one friend with the patience for a two hour phone call with the bank for some $10 fee) or that his insurance coverage is as tailored to his risk profile as the market will allow. He actually reads insurance policies end to end.
Years ago, when he shopped for his homeowners insurance it took him 10+ phone calls and dozens of online form fills to find the right deal. He also suffered tons of collateral damage in the process: websites sold his information to dozens of agents who proceeded to call, text, and email him a spam hoard that grows to this day.
After this painful search made us aware of the problem, we also spent a lot of time doing user research with wealthy-ish tech employees to see if they felt the same way. They did, and also complained that they 1) often felt like they'd left money on the table, 2) didn’t really understand their coverages, and 3) that brokers were slow, hard to communicate with, and unreliable.
To solve the problem, we set out to build Coverage Cat. Our approach has three major components:
First, we work really really hard to find and partner with insurance carriers that offer high-quality, competitively-priced products. We've also taken time to identify insurers that work on a direct-to-consumer basis or transparently list their prices online so we can make our customers aware of all the options available to them. We get paid commission when we match users to great insurance deals, but we still show and recommend folks deals that we don't make money on when they're accessible and will always recommend users buy what's best for their personal financial situation. Our goal is to meaningfully improve price transparency so consumers (and their AI agents) can make informed coverage decisions and not get nickel-and-dimed!
Second, we automate every possible part of the insurance process. Some forms, portals, & approvals still need human review due to regulatory constraints, but if it's not restricted, we're automating it. LLMs have given our small team tremendous leverage and enabled us to tackle problems at a scale that would've been unfathomable five years ago.
Finally, we build for agents first (a remix of the more classic adage, build for developers/APIs). We've always been big believers that personal finance would be the killer use-case for the AI revolution and have done our best to position ourselves to surf the wave. As personal assistants have started to explode onto the mainstream (think Muse, Instinct, Town, Codex, CC etc.) we've ensured our shopping and comparison process works via API/MCP so agents can present their users with all the information they need to make a good decision and transform a miserable shopping experience into a delightful one.
Coverage Cat is an unusual business because, while we also help folks find homeowners insurance in California and Texas, our main focus is on umbrella insurance. Most brokerages only sell umbrella coverage as a customer retention product, but it makes them almost no money. We focus on it as our core business because: 1) it's one piece of the insurance puzzle that many people in tech overlook and/or are confused about even though it can have a huge impact on their financial well-being. 2) Existing online tools and brokerages broadly don't make it easy to comparison shop for. 3) It was, for us, the most technically feasible candidate for automation given startup resource constraints.
Insofar as we know Coverage Cat is the first instance of a tool/portal that allows AI agents to complete most of the comparison and shopping steps required to allow people to buy insurance.
Also happy to answer any questions about the product, the problem space, and even some insurance questions (Max is a licensed agent) where regulation permits. Cheers!
I’d recommend distilling that down because I stopped reading before figuring out what your product does. And if I did that, then you can bet others did too.
I do wish you the best of luck with your business though.
Yeah this reasonable sounding explanation is all the way at the bottom strangely:
Coverage Cat is a licensed insurance brokerage that helps you compare home, umbrella, auto, and renters coverage side by side — with straight pricing, no sold leads, and a real broker on the other end.
Ask a question or start a comparison. Coverage Cat pairs AI-guided intake with a licensed brokerage team, so you can size up coverage, see honest price ranges, and compare real carrier options without handing your details to five agents overnight. Developers can drive the same flow through the Agent API.
I'm probably your target audience - I have umbrella insurance - but I just grabbed it through my existing GEICO/travelers insurance and it was basically painless. It isn't so expensive I felt compelled to shop massively for it and nothing I read above convinced me I'm wrong there?
If you're happy with it, then great, no issue! I think Coverage Cat excels for people that want to get quotes from more than just a single option, have underwriting details that make it so an umbrella policy isn't dirt cheap, and would rather not talk to a salesperson on the phone. But if that isn't you, that's just fine!
Perhaps I'm not making myself clear: There might be reasons I _shouldn't_ be happy with it! Maybe I'm overpaying, maybe I'm missing out on subtleties of one insurer vs another, etc. And I mean, hello, I'm posting here, of _course_ i'd rather not talk to a salesperson on the phone.
Your post actually inspired me to go raise the amount of my coverage. I was paying attention. It triggered some thinking. It even triggered action. But maybe I wasn't paying attention to the part you wished I was.
Maybe I'm a bad salesman, but based on your description so far, if you're satisfied it likely isn't worth the chore of changing. Actually, my hope is that fewer people ever have to spend hours of their life dealing with insurance matters, and we can find a new efficiency in a society where everyone is always getting the best policy without having to think about it at all.
Part of what inspired us to do this is a serious frustration with the millions of people that buy the wrong coverages or are overpaying because they don't have the time or energy to shop around. It would be nice if everyone was our customer, but I'm also the kind of person just satisfied to hear you made a little improvement in your own finances.
This is great to hear, I'd count this as a success in our book!
After much trial and error, we've come to realize that trying to separate users from their existing insurance arrangements is very hard unless there's some sort of stark event that triggers the switch.
I.e., folks will usually only make a purchase with us if one of the following is true (even if they could save money or improve coverage):
- they're shopping for the first time and want a modern, online-first, service that avoids hassle
- their premiums have jumped
- they were non-renewed
Most users' experience of shopping for insurance has been historically so bad that they're very averse to optimizing it, even if 10m or so could save them hundreds (and in extreme cases thousands) of dollars.
Coverage Cat actually gets a lot of GEICO customers, because it's pretty often the case you'll find better prices unbundled than bundled. That's not true for everyone of course, but it's true for most folks — a different way of thinking about it is, "Even after a small bundle discount, what's the likelihood the single bundling option is the cheapest" and the answer is that often it isn't.
Just to give you some sense of this, someone with identical underwriting details can often see $1000+ price differences between carriers. So a 10% bundle discount begins to fade compared to something like that.
Congrats on the launch. The first startup I joined years ago was Insurance.com, and I really enjoyed my time there. I helped to buildout quite a bit of it. If you ever want to chat about the space feel free to message me.
We’re building Coverage Cat: a licensed insurance brokerage that helps you compare umbrella and home coverage side by side — with straight pricing, no sold leads, and a real broker on the other end. Our current focus is helping tech folks (think L3-L8) buy umbrella insurance.
Coverage Cat pairs AI-guided intake with a licensed brokerage team, so you can size up coverage, see honest price ranges, and compare real carrier options without handing your details to five agents overnight. Folks who use personal AI agents (think Muse, Instinct, Town, Openclaw, etc.) can drive the same flow through the Agent API/MCP.
We’d love your feedback so please do try it out. Just feed the prompt: “Shop for umbrella insurance with Coverage Cat” to your personal agent and let us know what you think!
If you want to watch a couple of agents navigate the flow before you use it there’s a video here: https://youtu.be/1BUkgAn6s-I
For those who are unfamiliar with this type of coverage, here’s a blurb from one of our insurance agents: “Umbrella liability insurance is a policy that provides additional coverage above the limits of existing auto, homeowners, renters, or landlord policies. It kicks in after the underlying policy limits are exhausted and may also cover personal injury claims like libel, slander, or defamation that standard policies often exclude. Policies typically start at $1 million in additional liability coverage and can protect you, your spouse, dependents, and even pets in your household.”
Buying insurance online is a miserable experience. You fill out a bunch of forms that say they’re going to give you quotes. Most don’t and then you end up with tons of unwanted phone calls and spam. Even if you wade through the muck, you’ll often still end up with sub-optimal prices and coverage because of a lack of market transparency and poorly-aligned advisory incentives.
We came to this problem because Max is a classic personal finance obsessive. He's the type of person that needs to know that he has the best possible price for something (everyone has one friend with the patience for a two hour phone call with the bank for some $10 fee) or that his insurance coverage is as tailored to his risk profile as the market will allow. He actually reads insurance policies end to end.
Years ago, when he shopped for his homeowners insurance it took him 10+ phone calls and dozens of online form fills to find the right deal. He also suffered tons of collateral damage in the process: websites sold his information to dozens of agents who proceeded to call, text, and email him a spam hoard that grows to this day.
After this painful search made us aware of the problem, we also spent a lot of time doing user research with wealthy-ish tech employees to see if they felt the same way. They did, and also complained that they 1) often felt like they'd left money on the table, 2) didn’t really understand their coverages, and 3) that brokers were slow, hard to communicate with, and unreliable.
To solve the problem, we set out to build Coverage Cat. Our approach has three major components:
First, we work really really hard to find and partner with insurance carriers that offer high-quality, competitively-priced products. We've also taken time to identify insurers that work on a direct-to-consumer basis or transparently list their prices online so we can make our customers aware of all the options available to them. We get paid commission when we match users to great insurance deals, but we still show and recommend folks deals that we don't make money on when they're accessible and will always recommend users buy what's best for their personal financial situation. Our goal is to meaningfully improve price transparency so consumers (and their AI agents) can make informed coverage decisions and not get nickel-and-dimed!
Second, we automate every possible part of the insurance process. Some forms, portals, & approvals still need human review due to regulatory constraints, but if it's not restricted, we're automating it. LLMs have given our small team tremendous leverage and enabled us to tackle problems at a scale that would've been unfathomable five years ago.
Finally, we build for agents first (a remix of the more classic adage, build for developers/APIs). We've always been big believers that personal finance would be the killer use-case for the AI revolution and have done our best to position ourselves to surf the wave. As personal assistants have started to explode onto the mainstream (think Muse, Instinct, Town, Codex, CC etc.) we've ensured our shopping and comparison process works via API/MCP so agents can present their users with all the information they need to make a good decision and transform a miserable shopping experience into a delightful one.
Coverage Cat is an unusual business because, while we also help folks find homeowners insurance in California and Texas, our main focus is on umbrella insurance. Most brokerages only sell umbrella coverage as a customer retention product, but it makes them almost no money. We focus on it as our core business because: 1) it's one piece of the insurance puzzle that many people in tech overlook and/or are confused about even though it can have a huge impact on their financial well-being. 2) Existing online tools and brokerages broadly don't make it easy to comparison shop for. 3) It was, for us, the most technically feasible candidate for automation given startup resource constraints.
Insofar as we know Coverage Cat is the first instance of a tool/portal that allows AI agents to complete most of the comparison and shopping steps required to allow people to buy insurance.
Also happy to answer any questions about the product, the problem space, and even some insurance questions (Max is a licensed agent) where regulation permits. Cheers!
That’s a very lengthy introduction.
I’d recommend distilling that down because I stopped reading before figuring out what your product does. And if I did that, then you can bet others did too.
I do wish you the best of luck with your business though.
Thank you for the feedback, let's see if they'll let us edit it down a bit.
Yeah this reasonable sounding explanation is all the way at the bottom strangely:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLUF_(communication)
Ironically one of my favorite acronyms
I'm probably your target audience - I have umbrella insurance - but I just grabbed it through my existing GEICO/travelers insurance and it was basically painless. It isn't so expensive I felt compelled to shop massively for it and nothing I read above convinced me I'm wrong there?
If you're happy with it, then great, no issue! I think Coverage Cat excels for people that want to get quotes from more than just a single option, have underwriting details that make it so an umbrella policy isn't dirt cheap, and would rather not talk to a salesperson on the phone. But if that isn't you, that's just fine!
Perhaps I'm not making myself clear: There might be reasons I _shouldn't_ be happy with it! Maybe I'm overpaying, maybe I'm missing out on subtleties of one insurer vs another, etc. And I mean, hello, I'm posting here, of _course_ i'd rather not talk to a salesperson on the phone.
Your post actually inspired me to go raise the amount of my coverage. I was paying attention. It triggered some thinking. It even triggered action. But maybe I wasn't paying attention to the part you wished I was.
Maybe I'm a bad salesman, but based on your description so far, if you're satisfied it likely isn't worth the chore of changing. Actually, my hope is that fewer people ever have to spend hours of their life dealing with insurance matters, and we can find a new efficiency in a society where everyone is always getting the best policy without having to think about it at all.
Part of what inspired us to do this is a serious frustration with the millions of people that buy the wrong coverages or are overpaying because they don't have the time or energy to shop around. It would be nice if everyone was our customer, but I'm also the kind of person just satisfied to hear you made a little improvement in your own finances.
seems reasonable to me! Thanks for responding.
This is great to hear, I'd count this as a success in our book!
After much trial and error, we've come to realize that trying to separate users from their existing insurance arrangements is very hard unless there's some sort of stark event that triggers the switch.
I.e., folks will usually only make a purchase with us if one of the following is true (even if they could save money or improve coverage):
- they're shopping for the first time and want a modern, online-first, service that avoids hassle
- their premiums have jumped
- they were non-renewed
Most users' experience of shopping for insurance has been historically so bad that they're very averse to optimizing it, even if 10m or so could save them hundreds (and in extreme cases thousands) of dollars.
Do you take into account the Berkshire Hathaway shareholder discount for GEICO, Home, and Umbrella insurance?
Edit: I edited this for clarity.
Coverage Cat actually gets a lot of GEICO customers, because it's pretty often the case you'll find better prices unbundled than bundled. That's not true for everyone of course, but it's true for most folks — a different way of thinking about it is, "Even after a small bundle discount, what's the likelihood the single bundling option is the cheapest" and the answer is that often it isn't.
Just to give you some sense of this, someone with identical underwriting details can often see $1000+ price differences between carriers. So a 10% bundle discount begins to fade compared to something like that.
GP meant "own" where they stated "know". Berkshire shareholders get a discount on Berkshire's insurance.
To answer more directly, yes we do! Most of the umbrella coverage we offer though is of the unbundled variety.
I live in a rainy and windy place, so I often need to replace a flipped umbrella. How did I not know that there's umbrella insurance!?
Some people do in fact ask us why we offer $10 million in limits for umbrella insurance... that's a lot of umbrellas...
Congrats on the launch. The first startup I joined years ago was Insurance.com, and I really enjoyed my time there. I helped to buildout quite a bit of it. If you ever want to chat about the space feel free to message me.
Emailed yah, thank you for the note!