Draft:Karn Saroya

• Comment: There are two 'References' sections. The first contains not references, but some external links which are not cited anywhere. Either cite them against the information they support, or else remove them. DoubleGrazing (talk) 17:36, 8 March 2026 (UTC)

• Comment: LinkedIn, Twitter and Medium are user-generated, and therefore not considered reliable. CoinDesk, PR Newswire and Toronto Guardian are also not generally reliable sources.
  There is too much unreferenced information, especially for an article on a living person (WP:BLP). I count about a dozen paragraphs without citations. Please note that every material statement, anything potentially contentious, and all private personal details (such as, but not only, WP:DOB) must be clearly supported with inline citations to reliable sources, or else removed. DoubleGrazing (talk) 17:34, 8 March 2026 (UTC)

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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 Vancouver, Canada to immigrant parents from Punjab, India and has described education and entrepreneurship as central influences during his upbringing.

Saroya 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. The company created and sold its own insurance policies in Texas and California, and its brokerage operation serviced all 50 states.

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 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.