Founders Everywhere: Sam Hodges
Sam Hodges is the co-founder & CEO of Vouch, the insurance broker built for ambitious leaders, firms, and companies.
Welcome to Founders Everywhere, where we highlight the incredible people behind the companies we’ve backed at Everywhere Ventures, a global pre-seed fund supported by a community of 500 founders and operators.
For many startups, getting commercial insurance has long been a frustrating and time-consuming process. Traditional providers rely on slow workflows that leave founders waiting weeks for coverage. And when things go wrong? They’re forced to navigate opaque claims processes. This approach clashes with the speed and complexity of high-growth businesses managing funding rounds, hires, and contracts. Since 2018, Vouch has been redefining insurance. Built by founders for founders, it offers a technology-driven platform tailored to startups and venture-backed companies, with coverage that scales as they grow. Vouch provides seamless quoting, expert guidance, and policies designed specifically for the unique risks of these innovation-driven companies that are shaping the future.
Co-founder and CEO Sam Hodges has spent over 20 years building and investing in companies at the intersection of technology, financial services, and insurance. He began his career doing strategy work for large PNC health and life carriers before joining the venture fund Pequot (later FirstMark Capital), where he worked closely with early InsurTech pioneer Larry Wilson. He later moved into operating roles including founding Funding Circle US, which went public in 2018. Following the IPO, Sam teamed up with Travis Hedge to launch Vouch, aiming to solve the slow, paper-heavy insurance process he had experienced as a founder. Together, they’ve built the leading provider of insurance to startups in the US.
What’s Vouch’s mission?
Our mission is to insure ambition. In practice, that means helping founders and their companies understand and manage their most important risks. For early-stage startups, it’s about right-sized, fairly priced, seamless coverage. For more complex growth-stage or middle-market companies, it’s about deeply understanding their exposures and making sure they’re getting the right coverage and risk management advice.
Why do customers choose Vouch?
We are where startups are. We work with 200+ venture funds on their portfolios, and with banking partners like SVB, JPMorgan, Stifel, and HSBC, plus platforms like Vanta, Carta, AngelList, and Justworks. When founders hit key inflection points (equity rounds, leases, debt, big customer contracts) we’re already in their orbit with trusted partners.
Technology-first experience. Instead of PDFs and email threads, we offer an integrated, app-driven experience across the lifecycle, from first quote to certificates to claims.
Deep expertise in venture-backed and innovation-driven businesses. This is our sole focus, and we’ve invested heavily in specialist teams, then used technology to make that expertise scalable and consistent.
Tailored coverage. For our first six years we ran our own underwriting entity and built custom coverage for startups; we sold that unit to Hiscox earlier this year but still work closely with them to keep coverage aligned to our clients’ real risks.
Customers tell us they love that Vouch feels like SaaS: fast, modern, and integrated, but backed by real experts and coverage built for their world.
Tell us about some recent milestones that Vouch crushed.
Getting to launch was the first big milestone; we went live in August 2019 after about a year of heavy lifting. Another major milestone was launching Vouch Horizon, our upmarket business for scaling companies. Today, roughly half of our premium comes from growth-stage clients, even though they’re only about 20% of our customer count. More recently, we expanded beyond tech, health, life sciences, and VC into professional services. We’re in the early days, but it’s an important category expansion. Overall, we now serve over 6,000 clients across the US.
How has your background influenced you as a founder?
I was lucky to work with great entrepreneurs early in my career and to build, as a founder and operator, across multiple financial technology and software companies. That breadth gives me pattern recognition and the ability to do dimensional problem solving, thinking across product, regulation, technology, capital markets, and operations. It’s why I’m most at home building companies that sit at the intersection of technology and financial services.
Any advice for founders?
Compared to when I started in the venture ecosystem 2006, there’s now an incredible amount of codified founder knowledge in books, blogs, newsletters, and podcasts. My main advice is to read broadly, stay curious, and stay close to the metal, especially with AI. Whatever your role, you should be hands-on with tools, talking to builders, and thinking deeply about how new capabilities and markets affect the organization you’re leading.
Fun Fact:
I trained in freediving and increased my breath-hold from about two minutes to nearly five, largely by learning to distinguish between CO₂ discomfort and actual lack of oxygen. It’s a good metaphor for startups: understanding what real limits are versus what just feels uncomfortable.
Listen to Prashanth Vijay, with Scott Hartley on the Venture Everywhere podcast: Follow the Fiber with Flume. Now on Apple & Spotify. Check out to all our past episodes here!
