Thesis

Why the world's largest financial market still has no exchange and what we are building to change it.

Imagine you own a house. One night a storm rolls in and rips the roof off. The repair costs $40,000. Without insurance, that bill could wipe out years of savings. With insurance, you file a claim, and someone else covers most of the cost.

Now multiply that by every person, every business, every hospital, every cargo ship, every factory, and every government on Earth. Every one of them faces risk — the possibility that something expensive and unexpected will happen. And most of them pay someone else to absorb that risk.

That is insurance. And globally, it is a $7 trillion annual market.

To put that in perspective:

US GDP
$28T
Global Insurance Premium
$7T
Total Crypto Market
$2.5T

Think of it like water.

That $7 trillion does not sit in one place. It flows like water through a series of connected pools, each one smaller and deeper than the last.

When you buy car insurance, your insurer bundles your risk with thousands of others. Then it passes a portion of that bundle to a reinsurer an insurance company for insurance companies. The reinsurer may pass some of it to another reinsurer. Eventually, slices of your risk reach pension funds and hedge funds on the other side of the world, packaged into bonds and securities.

Each layer takes a fee, absorbs some risk, and passes the rest along. Here is what that cascade looks like:

Everything that happens in the real world — storms, car accidents, fires, illness. This is where all risk begins.

Individuals$2T+
Businesses$2.5T+
Developers$25B+
Lenders$300B+
GovernmentsTrillions
Ecosystems$40T+ gap

The insurance companies you know. They sell you a policy and promise to pay when something goes wrong.

Primary Carriers$5.5T
Retail Brokers$60B+
Wholesale Brokers$15B+

Licensed carriers that issue policies on behalf of others, acting as a regulatory bridge between risk and capital.

Fronting Carrier$20B+
MGAs$100B+
Program Admins$50B+

Insurance for insurance companies. Reinsurers absorb large chunks of risk so primary insurers do not collapse from a single catastrophe.

Reinsurers$700B
Primary Insurers$5.5T

A market where reinsurers split risk proportionally — sharing both premiums and losses at agreed percentages.

Captives$200B+
Risk Pools$50B+

Reinsurance for reinsurers. The risk keeps moving outward, each layer absorbing what the previous one cannot hold.

Retrocession$80B+
Residual Markets$100B+
Public BackstopsSovereign

Insurance-Linked Securities — where catastrophe risk finally reaches the capital markets, packaged into tradeable bonds.

ILS Funds$100B+
Cat Bond Investors$45B+

Onchain infrastructure that connects capital markets to insurance risk — transparent, real-time, verifiable.

On-Chain Capital$500M+

Pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, and asset managers seeking uncorrelated yield from insurance risk.

Carrier Equity$1T+
Reinsurer Balance Sheets$500B+
Pension & Institutional$50T AUM
Hedge Funds$30B+

Risk is not one thing.

When people think of insurance, they picture car accidents or house fires. But the world of insurable risk is vast and strange. There are markets for hurricane damage in Florida, cyber attacks on banks, earthquakes in Tokyo, crop failure in Iowa, and pandemics that shut down entire economies.

Each category of risk is called a peril - and each peril is its own market, with its own pricing, its own models, and its own capital base. The universe of insurable risk is vast:

Every one of these is a distinct market - with its own data, its own models, its own capital requirements. And every one of them needs infrastructure.

Life & Health

Longevity $3.4T, Health $1.2T+, Medical Malpractice $15B+

Liability

Product Liability $30B+, D&O / E&O $22B+, Litigation Finance $16B+, Environmental $6B+

Catastrophe

Hurricane $80B+, Earthquake $40B+, Flood $30B+, Wildfire $25B+, Winter Storm $20B+, Severe Convective $35B+

Cyber & Technology

Cyber Attack $16B-$80B+, AI Liability nascent, Supply Chain $20B+

Property & Casualty

Auto $400B+, Commercial Property $180B+, Homeowners $130B+, Construction $25B+

Climate & Agriculture

Climate Transition vast, Drought / Crop $60B+, Energy Transition growing

Specialty

Marine / Cargo $35B+, Aviation $8B+, Space $1B-$10B+, Political Risk $12B+

Emerging & Tail Risk

Pandemic $300B+ gap, Terrorism $8B+, Nuclear sovereign backstop, Unknown Emerging infinite

A capital market is not just buyers and sellers.

Risk flows from originators to capital providers through a chain of manufacturers, distributors, and warehouses. Each layer transforms risk packaging, pricing, and redistributing it until it reaches the balance sheets that can hold it.

But a functioning capital market also requires rails for pricing, clearing, settlement, reporting, and liquidity. In insurance risk, this infrastructure layer is the most underdeveloped in the entire system, and the single largest source of inefficiency. Building these rails is the work of the next five years.

Pipes, not products.

Now you understand the market and the risks. But here is the part most people miss: this enormous, essential, $7-trillion-a-year market runs on terrible plumbing.

Settlements take months. Data flows through spreadsheets and emails. There is no exchange, no standard contract format, no real-time pricing. The stock market moved to electronic trading decades ago. Insurance still runs on phone calls and quarterly reports.

The result is a $1.8 trillion protection gap losses over the past decade that should have been insured but were not. Not because capital was unavailable, but because the infrastructure could not connect capital to risk efficiently.

Fixing this requires building four layers of infrastructure:

Data & Modeling

- Understanding what is at risk

Underwriting Data, Exposure Models, Catastrophe Models

Pricing & Execution

- Turning risk into contract

Pricing Engines, Legal Wrappers, Settlement Rails

Risk Management

- Tracking obligation in flight

Claims System, Collateral Management, Bordereaux

Trust & Transparency

- Making it all verifiable

Regulatory Rails, Secondary Liquidity, Transparency

So why are we doing this?

Insurance risk is the largest financial market most people have never heard of. It generates real, uncorrelated yield returns that come from actual insurance premiums, not from financial engineering or token emissions. When a hurricane does not hit, the premiums paid by homeowners flow through to the capital providers who took that risk. That is real yield.

Yet this market has no exchange. No real-time settlement. No transparent pricing. The last structural innovation was the catastrophe bond, invented in 1997. Meanwhile, every other financial market equities, fixed income, commodities, foreign exchange has been rebuilt from the ground up with technology.

We are building the internet's capital market for insurance risk. Not a new insurance company. Not a new product. The infrastructure the rails that let capital flow into risk and premiums flow back out, transparently and in real time.

Insurance risk is the foundation of modern civilization. It is the quiet mechanism that lets people take risks, build businesses, raise families, and recover from disaster. Without it, nothing that requires courage would be economically rational.

We believe this market deserves infrastructure as sophisticated as the risks it covers. That is what Re is building verifiable solvency, transparent underwriting, real-time settlement, and open access to the world's oldest and largest risk transfer market.

This letter is an introduction. The white paper goes deeper.

Karn Saroya

CEO & Co-Founder, Re

March 2026

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