Karn Saroya

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Karn Saroya, CEO and Co-Founder of Re

Karn Saroya (born January 21, 1986) is a Canadian internet entrepreneur and fintech executive. He is the co-founder and CEO of Re, the parent company of the blockchain-native reinsurance platform.

Previously, he was the co-founder and CEO of the fashion recommendation app Stylekick, whose team joined Shopify in 2015, and the mobile first insurance startup Cover. Saroya began his career in strategy consulting at Oliver Wyman and later transitioned into entrepreneurship, building multiple high impact ventures at the intersection of insurance, fintech, and decentralized finance.

He is known for building companies across consumer technology, and blockchain based financial infrastructure. His work has focused on applying software to financial markets, particularly insurance and reinsurance.

Through his ventures, Saroya has contributed to the broader emergence of real world asset tokenization and the use of decentralized systems in institutional finance. His companies have raised over $60 million in venture capital from firms including Y Combinator, Tribe Capital, Samsung Ventures, and Tencent.

Early Life and Education

Saroya was born in Surrey, British Columbia, to immigrant parents from Punjab, India and has described education and entrepreneurship as central influences during his upbringing.

Raised in Mississauga, Ontario, he attended Gordon Graydon Memorial Secondary School in Mississauga. As a high school student, Saroya co-founded his first tech startup with Anand Dhillon and was profiled in The Mississauga News for his early entrepreneurial efforts.

He earned a Bachelor of Commerce with First Class Honours with Distinction from Queen’s University. At Queen’s, he met Natalie Gray, who would go on to become his long-time collaborator and co-founder.

Saroya later completed a Master’s degree in Finance at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) under a Fulbright Scholarship, where his academic focus included financial markets, risk, and quantitative modeling.

Career

Early Roles and Startups (2011–2015)

After graduating from MIT, Saroya worked as a consultant in Oliver Wyman’s Financial Services Practice, where he advised global banks and insurance firms on strategy, capital efficiency, and risk management.

His consulting work exposed him to regulatory frameworks and large-scale financial systems, which later informed his entrepreneurial work in insurance and reinsurance technology.

In 2013, Saroya co-founded Stylekick, a mobile fashion app that used an algorithm to suggest garments based on style and price.

Stylekick gained international traction for its use of algorithmic recommendations to match users with apparel based on visual similarity and price.

The app was translated into 14 languages, became the #1 fashion app in most AppStore geographies, and was featured on the front page of the U.S. App Store.

In 2016, Stylekick was nominated for a Canadian Arts & Fashion Award (CAFA) in the Fashion Innovation category.

Cover (2016–2021)

Following, Saroya co-founded Cover, a mobile-first insurance platform that allowed users to get insurance quotes instantly by photographing the item they wanted to insure.

The company entered Y Combinator’s Winter 2016 batch and went on to raise over $27 million from investors including Social Capital (through Arjun Sethi), Y Combinator, Ron Conway, Liquid 2 Ventures, Tencent, and Samsung Ventures.

Cover differentiated itself by combining a consumer-facing mobile experience with licensed insurance underwriting, operating both as a brokerage and as a producer of proprietary insurance policies.

Cover created and sold its own insurance policies in Texas and California, and its brokerage operation serviced all 50 states. During its operation, Cover expanded nationally and became one of the more visible examples of mobile-first insurance distribution in the United States.

Several of Cover’s apps were featured on the front page of the U.S. App Store in the fintech category, at one point making Saroya the only founder with two trending apps across distinct categories: Cover in fintech and Stylekick in lifestyle.

Re (2022 - Present)

In 2022, Saroya co-founded Re, the company behind the blockchain platform to transform reinsurance through programmable, blockchain-native infrastructure.

The platform enables capital providers to access and participate in insurance risk markets directly, using smart contracts and real-time risk data to underwrite and clear contracts onchain.

Re is positioned as one of the first credible and institutionally aligned efforts to bring real-world underwriting into the Web3 space.

Since launch, the protocol has supported over $349 million in total value locked (TVL) and facilitated more than $190 million in cumulative premiums written across onchain reinsurance programs.

Re has drawn attention across both the crypto and traditional insurance industries for its technical design and market potential.

CoinDesk and The Block have cited the platform as a key innovation in connecting blockchain-based capital to real world assets such as reinsurance contracts. The Insurer, a traditional industry publication, has highlighted Re’s approach as a structural evolution in the risk capital stack, and Business Insider has profiled Saroya for his ability to apply insurtech and fintech expertise to decentralized markets.

The platform operates across multiple blockchain networks and has established partnerships with onchain infrastructure providers, capital markets protocols, and risk modeling firms to support regulated and non-regulated insurance use cases.

The company has secured investment from leading fintech and Web3 firms as wekk as insurance companies, including Coinbase, Tribe Capital, Framework Ventures, Stratos, and Electric Capital.

By 2024, Re had become one of the largest onchain reinsurance platforms by deployed capital, with active participation from both crypto native liquidity providers and institutional insurance market participants.

Vision and Industry Impact

Saroya is a leading proponent of real-world assets (RWAs) being deployed onchain and frequently speaks about the future of decentralized capital markets and programmable risk infrastructure.

Through conference appearances, interviews, and public discussions, Saroya has outlined a vision in which insurance risk, underwriting logic, and capital allocation are managed through open and composable systems.

His commentary has often positioned insurance as a potential bridge between decentralized finance and traditional financial markets.

At the Avalanche Summit, he spoke about the shift toward "composable insurance protocols" that allow onchain capital to access offchain risk.

“The future of insurance capital is composable. We can price, structure, and clear risk in real time with code.” – Avalanche Summit 2023

In an ETH Rising panel discussion, Saroya said:

“There’s no reason a smart contract can’t replace a treaty. What Re.xyz is doing is proving that not only is it possible, it’s better.”

On Twitter Spaces, Saroya has consistently made the case that DeFi is “missing its killer use case until it touches real-world assets. Insurance is that bridge.” His essays and interviews outline a vision where risk, capital, and underwriting logic are all onchain, open-source, and composable.

References

• TechCrunch – Cover collects $16M to insure your gadgets, pets… anything
• Toronto Life – The Upstart: Karn Saroya, co-founder of Cover, who’s trying to make insurance painless
• Business Insider – Karn Saroya's Web3 seed startup is creating a version of Lloyds of London for crypto. It was just valued at $100 million
• Yahoo Finance – Re Expands Institutional Offerings on Avalanche with New Reinsurance Yield Products and Points Program
• CoinDesk – Blockchain-Powered Reinsurer Re Raises $14 Million Seed Round to Build Decentralized Market
• The Block – Karn Saroya raises $14 million for insurance protocol Re as insurtech platform Cover is wound down
• The Insurer – Re’s Saroya: On-chain reinsurer targets $400 million premium as blockchain capital converges with traditional markets
• Y Combinator Podcast – How to Build an Insurance Startup

References

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