SAN FRANCISCO — At first glance, the coffee shop at the southwestern corner of this city’s Financial District stands out only because it is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week in a neighborhood known for going quiet at night.

Inside, however, those stopping by the Corgi Cafe may soon realize it is no ordinary latte vendor, but rather a hub of San Francisco’s booming artificial intelligence economy.

Behind a minimalist beverage bar that serves caffeinated staples, protein shakes and green smoothies, customers are greeted by a sign that reads: “Good startups get insured by Corgi.”

The cafe is the literal pet project of an AI company, Corgi Insurance, that is determined to disrupt what founders Emily Yuan and Nico Laqua describe as an inefficient, bloated insurance industry built on pushing paperwork to secure corporate clients against risk.

“We’re a complete replacement, a competitor to (Charles) Schwab or Berkshire Hathaway or Munich Re — any of the traditional insurers that people go to,” said Laqua, who previously worked with Yuan on a videogame business, Basket Entertainment.

Corgi seeks to modernize insurance for tech companies and other businesses by heavily cutting customer costs. It is equipped with an army of AI tools and a staff of 90 employees, far fewer than the “middlemen,” as Laqua calls them, who take a cut of every insurance bill.

The two founders have never run a coffee shop before. Laqua, 26, is an AI researcher and Yuan, 24, is a computer science major who dropped out of Stanford to enter the ground floor of an industry that could radically transform the global economy.

The company, which had raised $108 million as of January and participated in the prestigious startup program Y Combinator, has full regulatory approval to operate as a licensed insurance carrier, its officials said.

Although insurance is Corgi’s actual business, the founders note their cafe project is more than just a marketing arm.

The coffee shop, which sits in an alley fittingly named Claude Lane, functions as both a venue for tech events and a workspace for software developers burning the midnight oil as they pursue their next disruptive innovation.

It is an adventurous side project for Yuan and Laqua, who want Corgi Cafe to emerge as an enduring storefront in a city barreling toward a daring, uncertain future.

Quotes have been edited for length and clarity.

Q: I’ll start with the obvious question: What leads an insurance company to open a 24-hour cafe?

A: Laqua: We love the Financial District in San Francisco; it’s where we’ve been for a number of years. Unfortunately, it feels like most businesses don’t love FiDi like we do, in the sense that they all close at 5 p.m. — it’s pretty dreary late at night.

There are all sorts of late-night oriented people who are mostly without anywhere to go. When we moved into this office, we had an empty space beneath that we were leasing, because we got the whole building. It used to be a barber shop.

We were kind of killing two birds with one stone; a lot of people would walk past (the storefront) and there was nothing in it. There are no 24-7 cafes anywhere in San Francisco. So we thought we could do something cool for the city and make use of this space we already had.

Q: Are you trying to turn the cafe into a full-scale business, or if it stays empty all night is that not a big deal?

A: Yuan: It’s pretty full, actually. Normally, about two-thirds full. As soon as people get off work in the afternoon, it starts filling up very quickly and stays there until very late, like 2 or 3 a.m. It’s probably at its emptiest at 8 a.m., and then it fills up again throughout the day.

Laqua: I did not think it’d be such a big hit, but it seems like every day there’s a social media post with a hundred or so likes. We don’t have an emptiness problem.

Q: Is food service something you cared about, beyond the cafe providing marketing for the insurance side?

A: Laqua: We don’t care so much about profit, which makes it easy to deliver value to people. We wanted to have really good drinks.

The most popular ones are matcha, the hot chocolate, teas, coffee — and then smoothies are our most popular items. We have these protein smoothies that are super good. I drink three or four of them a day; it’s probably half of my caloric intake at this point.

Some of our baristas have great, relevant experience at Equinox’s Earth Bar or Peet’s Coffee or Starbucks, so they could make better versions of what they were already used to making. Our executive chef, Angela, is super talented and spent a couple months trialing everything to make sure it tasted really good.

Our main focus is providing a great space for builders to have a place to work. We’ll never be closed; even if there’s a fire burning down the city, you’ll find my charred body behind the counter, serving drinks.

Q: What are some of the amenities you offer to developers looking to build ideas? Is it just desks and chairs?

A: Laqua: Right now it’s just tables and chairs, but we’re getting call booths very soon, and quite a lot of them. In addition to being the first and only 24-7 cafe in San Francisco, we’ll be the only place with call booths, so you’ll be able to take your calls in peace and quiet.

Q: Take me through the insurance side of the business. If someone is looking to get insured, can they rely on Corgi for their end-to-end needs?

A: Laqua: We handle all of it: the underwriting, the policy administration, the regulatory filings, the claims. Right now people are overpaying for terrible service.

Yuan: And they’re paying for terrible service because there are five layers of middlemen.

Laqua: We found that by replacing the middlemen and actually using LLMs to speed everything up, we can provide much faster, more efficient, cheaper coverage.

If people have a claim or face a lawsuit, they know they’re dealing with us and not some call center abroad, or many layers of middlemen who are all taking their own cuts. Twenty-four hours a day, we’re always ready to go and address any claims and make sure people are protected.

Q: How are most of your employees different from traditional insurance workers?

A: Laqua: They are technologists. A lot of them are writing code, managing product and operations; some are handling accounts. But you won’t find a bunch of people behind desks shuffling papers around.

We’re a tech company that happens to do insurance, not an insurance company that spends too much on engineering.

We did think it would be useful to bring in a couple people with industry experience, so on the regulatory and claims and underwriting sides we’re very well staffed with people who have been doing insurance for quite a long time.

But the big thing is, we don’t have these people manually doing the work. We have them teaching the engineers the workflows so we can have technology do the work much faster, and automatically, so we don’t waste people’s time.

Q: You’re both fairly young people. When you’re starting a company like this, how do you learn about the insurance industry to the extent that you feel comfortable taking it on as a disrupting force?

A: Yuan: Everything is learnable, that’s why we bring on a lot of smart people who can pick up these things very quickly. Combining people with a lot of experience with a lot of engineers and technical people, we can build a very streamlined business.

Laqua: Insurance is very complicated. It’s probably the most complicated area within financial services. But there aren’t a thousand Albert Einsteins working for Schwab or Berkshire Hathaway. If you put in the work and deeply care about the problem, you can learn pretty much everything.

Q: What is the endgame here for insurance jobs and the overall economy if these industries get disrupted by tech companies?

A: Laqua: I think it’s a very positive thing. If you look at our competitors, they employ tens of thousands of people — sometimes hundreds of thousands — that are pushing paperwork around. It’s incredibly unfulfilling, unproductive and a tax on every business and person who’s paying them to send faxes.

Given that basically everyone hates insurance … I think every single business and person can be a little more protected, and profitable, by removing those humans from the loop and using technology instead.

If you’re a middleman marking up insurance and not providing any value, I think you’re going to be out of a job very soon — it’s our job to put that person out of a job.

And there’s going to be plenty of new value created, because if we do our job, every business becomes more profitable and wastes less time.

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