Corgi Funds may be a new name to many Alphaville readers, but the San Francisco-based company seems intent on turning the ETF industry into the financial equivalent of a puppy mill.
Corgi may have only unleashed its first ETFs in December, but it is now the proud dogparent of 188 ETFs. Yes, one hundred and eighty-eight. And it’s just getting started.
If all the ETFs it has filed for with the Securities and Exchange Commission see the light of day, in the next few months it will have 550 — usurping BlackRock, the world’s largest investment group, which manages 488 US ETFs, according to StockAnalysis. Vanguard has just 116.
There’s still the small matter of Corgi currently having less than $1bn under management. And Corgi is a somewhat leaner operation than its chubby namesake would suggest, with just 10 employees in its funds operation, although the parent company, an upstart insurer, boasts around 200.
In a sense, none of this is surprising. All Corgi has done is to take the “spaghetti cannon” approach of the increasingly manic ETF industry — launch a torrent of funds and see what sticks — to its logical if extreme conclusion.
Here’s a random selection of its suite of ETFs:
It bills itself as a venture capital-fuelled disrupter aiming to undercut incumbent ETF issuers on fees and rapidly raise assets to reap the economies of scale that underpin the financial dynamics of the fund industry. As Anthony Crinieri, a portfolio manager at Corgi told Alphaville, it has bigger dreams:
We believe we can provide not only new niche exposures but also do it at a lower cost than many of our competitors who have been resting on their laurels for a while and have higher fees.
We have been busy in the past few months and we are just getting started. It’s definitely part of the plan to have the most product offerings, ahead of BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard and all those folks.
Our broader mission is reinventing the financial infrastructure of the world.
Very Neumannesque. But exactly what is Corgi and its parent company?
Corgi was founded in 2024 by Nico Laqua and Emily Yuan, who originally teamed up to create gaming business Basket Entertainment, which claims 200mn+ monthly active users for its 300 games, ranging from Roll a Fat Friend to Unga Bunga Caveman Tycoon.
But like so many twentysomethings, the duo yearned to ditch the gaming industry for something more fun, like insurance.
The result was Corgi, “the first AI-native, full-stack insurance platform purpose-built for start-ups”, which received regulatory approval in July 2025. The genesis for the idea was the cost and hassle of obtaining insurance for Basket Entertainment, which led Laqua and Yuan to believe there was a larger business opportunity.
It offers directors’ and officers’, cyber, technology errors-and-omissions and general liability cover, as well as media liability insurance. Modestly, Corgi says:
Our goal is to rebuild the $1T+ insurance industry from the ground up. We’re not just making a company; we’re engineering financial infrastructure for the next hundred years.
Financial details on the parent company are scant, although it claimed annualised revenue of $40mn in 2025. On May 7 Corgi said it had raised $160mn in a Series B funding at a valuation of $1.3bn from a range of VC houses including TCV, Kindred Ventures and Nordstar, building on an earlier $108mn raised in seed and Series A funding from investors including Y Combinator.
Just three weeks later it said its valuation had doubled to $2.6bn when it announced a further $106mn of funding in a Series B1 round from many of the same investors, although it should be noted this funding round only covered 4 per cent of its shares.
In the latter announcement, Laqua — who keeps a mattress on the office floor, handy in a company where staff are expected to work in person 6-7 days a week — claimed Corgi was profitable in April, and that the new money would allow it to expand into new verticals such as trucking, small business and sports.
It’s unclear how much of this $2.6bn valuation stems from the 24/7 public cafés it also operates at its offices in San Francisco and Atlanta. Its website claims further office/cafés combos are coming “soon” to London’s trendy Shoreditch district, three sites in New York and, pleasingly, the Dogpatch district of San Francisco. Oh, and Corgi also runs a shuttle bus service in SF. Because obviously.
As Crinieri tells it, the idea for the ETF business stemmed from a desire to invest the insurance company assets internally. For regulatory reasons Alphaville hopes that the insurance assets aren’t being invested in *checks notes* Corgi’s 2x leveraged Coinbase or Taiwan ETFs, and we suspect that these funds will be a tough sell to institutional investors.
While Corgi is hopeful that some of its ETFs will appeal to more sophisticated pools of capital eventually, it recognises that this is unlikely to happen until the funds have built up the multiyear record that institutions tend to insist upon. So in the meantime it is focusing on retail investors, Crinieri said.
We believe that self-directed retail is probably one of the most overlooked pools of capital, at least in the ETF space. It’s a multitrillion dollar pool of capital that hasn’t been fully tapped into at the moment.
And boy does Corgi hope to tap that. Its existing ETFs give the impression that staff are handed a list of available ticker symbols and challenged to reverse-engineer funds to fit them.
Corgi rejoices in GLAM (Beauty, Skincare & Aesthetics), BREW (Coffee & Energy Drinks) and HULL (Shipping & Global Logistics, sadly, not the delights of the East Yorkshire city).
Alphaville supposes that’s one way for a YUNG (Longevity Consumer) company to create a BZZ (Drones & Urban Air Mobility), but what are the ODDZ (Sports Betting & Gambling) of such a sight for sore EYES (Data & Surveillance) occurring by chance?
It’s not all thematic funds, though, with leveraged (designed to dial up risk) buffer (designed to dial it down) and fixed income also in the mix. So far the only one to have taken off is the more prosaically tickered EUV —Lithography & Semiconductor Photonics — which has garnered $485mn of assets since launching in May.
But this is just the start. While its outstanding filings include plenty more leveraged and thematic ETFs, Corgi has doggedly worked through just about every grown-up exposure known to mankind, such as broad market US and overseas equities, factors such as value and growth, industry sectors and lots more fixed income.
And many of its offerings are genuinely cheap. Its leveraged ETFs are typically priced at 0.2 or 0.45 per cent, compared to around 0.9 per cent for rival offerings. Its buffer ETFs have fees of 0.3 per cent, versus 0.8 per cent or so elsewhere. Its Treasury bond ETFs, at 0.05 per cent, even undercut the diminutive fees of 0.09 to 0.15 per cent charged by industry heavyweights such as BlackRock and State Street.
However, a cheap product isn’t guaranteed to succeed without distribution, and without distribution Corgi will struggle to build the volume of assets it surely needs to make ends meet. The industry rule of thumb is that an ETF needs around $50mn or so of assets to break even. Charging low fees pushes that figure higher still.
Crinieri argues that Corgi’s AI-heavy, employee-light model may lower this break-even figure, and hopes that its social media presence will drive investor awareness and distribution. We’ll see.
Despite the long odds, many industry commentators are watching intently. “We are either going to look back on this as a great idea or a flawed experiment,” says Todd Sohn, chief ETF strategist at Strategas Asset Management, who nevertheless believes it is “admirable that Corgi are trying to bring fees down”.
“The audacity is fascinating. The economics remain unproven,” adds Michael O’Riordan, founding partner of Blackwater Search and Advisory.
