Some industries whisper disruption. Insurance never bothered. It just buried people in PDFs and hold music and called it underwriting. Then Harper walked in and decided the policy should not require a séance.
Harper, YC W25, just secured $47M in combined Seed and Series A funding. Emergence Capital led the round, with participation from Y Combinator, Peak XV Partners, Antler, 10x Founders, Fellows Fund, Outset Capital, Lobster Capital, Optimist Ventures, Pioneer Fund, and Untapped Ventures. That is not a cap table. That is a conviction table.
Congratulations to Dakotah Rice, CEO and Co-founder, and Tushar Nair, Co-founder and CTO. 2 Goldman Sachs alumni who looked at commercial insurance, saw the fax machine vibes, and said, we can do better than this.
Harper is building an AI-native commercial insurance brokerage for small and mid-sized businesses. Not a chatbot bolted onto a legacy stack. Not software for brokers who still think “reply all” is a growth strategy. A brokerage powered by proprietary AI that automates intake, submission packaging, carrier matching, and client communication. They are the broker of record. They own the outcome.
And outcomes matter when you are a construction firm in Ohio, a healthcare operator in Texas, or a manufacturer in California trying to get coverage without aging 5 years in the process.
YC highlighted that Harper launched and quickly grew to write over $6M in annualized premiums across 35 states. Emergence notes they have already served thousands of businesses. In insurance time, that is not a sprint. That is a warp drive.
Here is the part founders should study. Dakotah Rice and Tushar Nair did not start by saying, let’s sprinkle AI on insurance. They started by asking why critical infrastructure for American businesses still runs on manual workflows and fragmented systems. They tested building tools for brokers. Then they made the sharper move. Build the brokerage itself. Control the pipe, not just the plumbing.
Harper Hub is the engine. It auto-completes complex forms, normalizes messy data, routes submissions to the right carriers, and manages communication at scale. More than 165 underwriter relationships. Hours instead of weeks for coverage. That is not just efficiency. That is oxygen for operators who cannot wait a month to land a contract.
The $47M fuels 3 levers: hiring engineers and operators who want to build real infrastructure, deepening carrier relationships, and investing further in their AI systems. Translation: more coverage, more speed, more signal in a market famous for noise.
Insurance is a promise. Most brokers sell paperwork. Harper sells clarity. And in a market this massive, clarity compounds. Dakotah Rice and Tushar Nair are not chasing hype cycles. They are rebuilding a category that touches every serious business in America. When infrastructure upgrades, entire ecosystems move differently.
