How MIC Global Turned Nine Months of Rejection into a $13M Insurance Company

Picture this: you’ve found real customers with real budgets who want to buy what you’re selling. You have projects lined up worth half a million dollars each. The demand is validated. The market is there. There’s just one problem—the companies you need as partners to deliver the product keep saying no.

Most founders would interpret this as a sign to pivot away from the opportunity. Harry Croydon did the opposite.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Harry Croydon, Co-Founder of MIC Global, an embedded microinsurance company that’s raised over $13 million, shared the story of how nine months of systematic rejection from every major insurance carrier led to a decision that would define his entire company: stop being a broker and become an insurance carrier instead.

The Perfect Setup That Went Nowhere

When MIC Global launched in 2019, the playbook seemed straightforward. Both Harry and his co-founder Jamie Crystal came from broker backgrounds. They’d find clients who needed microinsurance products, then place that business with major carriers who had the capacity to underwrite it.

The first part worked flawlessly. “I found three or four projects to do like half a million dollars each, couple of million dollars of work,” Harry explains. These weren’t hypothetical opportunities or tire-kickers. These were actual clients ready to write checks for insurance products tailored to the platform economy—coverage by the project, by the night, by the mile.

Harry took these deals to the obvious partners: AIG, Munich Re, the massive global carriers with billions in capacity and centuries of experience. Surely they’d recognize the opportunity.

They didn’t.

“Despite having that work and despite having those projects and the clients wanting to do it took us a Long time to get those companies to basically say, no, they don’t want to do it,” Harry recalls. “You know, they thought it was too small or too difficult or not for them.”

The Death March of Enterprise Sales

What followed was a masterclass in enterprise sales frustration. Not the kind where you can’t get meetings or generate interest. Worse—the kind where everyone is polite, the opportunity seems real, but nothing ever actually happens.

Month one became month three. Month three became month six. The deals Harry had lined up remained ready to close, but the carriers wouldn’t commit. The fundamental problem became clear: innovation wasn’t welcome.

“We kind of got frustrated in the first sort of, you know, six to nine months with, we can’t place this business individually like this. You know, we couldn’t operate like just a broker,” Harry explains.

Think about this dynamic from the carrier’s perspective. They had existing processes built for traditional annual policies. Their underwriting models, their systems, their entire operational infrastructure assumed insurance worked a certain way. Microinsurance—short-term, flexible, embedded into other product flows—broke all those assumptions.

The deals weren’t too small in absolute terms. They were too different. And different is expensive when you’re a massive incumbent with legacy systems and established processes.

The Decision Point

Somewhere around month eight or nine, Harry and Jamie faced the fundamental question every founder eventually confronts: do we have the right problem or the wrong partners?

The conventional startup advice would suggest they had the wrong problem. If your distribution partners won’t distribute, if the gatekeepers keep the gate closed, maybe you’re trying to force something the market doesn’t want.

But Harry had something most founders don’t: decades of experience in insurance. He’d been trying to sell insurance technology since 1999, when customers literally wanted everything done by fax machine. He knew the difference between a market that doesn’t exist and a market that incumbents refuse to serve.

The customers wanted the product. The incumbents wouldn’t adapt. The solution became obvious: become an incumbent themselves.

Becoming What You Couldn’t Partner With

“We decided that we ought to become an insurance company so that we could say yes to these things, and that’s what we did. So in 2020, we set up our first insurance entity and started to place insurance into that,” Harry explains with a simplicity that masks how radical this decision was.

This wasn’t a minor pivot. It was a complete transformation of their business model, their capital requirements, their regulatory burden, and their value proposition.

As a broker, you need relationships and sales capability. As an insurance carrier, you need underwriting expertise, capital reserves, regulatory licenses in every jurisdiction you operate, sophisticated risk management, claims processing infrastructure, and compliance systems. The barriers to entry aren’t high—they’re astronomical.

But this transformation solved the core problem completely. MIC Global no longer needed permission from major carriers to say yes to opportunities. They could design products specifically for the platform economy, price them appropriately, and accept business directly.

“That made it a lot easier for us to say, you know, actually design products and then go and talk to clients about those products and our ideas and then accept it, and then we can place business and start writing business,” Harry notes.

What Changed Immediately

The shift in their market position was immediate and dramatic. Before, every customer conversation ended with “let me check with our carrier partners.” After becoming a carrier, conversations ended with “yes, we can do that.”

Revenue started flowing in early 2020. The same types of deals that major carriers rejected became MIC Global’s core business. They weren’t trying to convince incumbents to change their processes anymore. They were building new processes from scratch, designed specifically for embedded microinsurance.

The technology stack they built reflected this. Rather than trying to sell software to insurance companies—a notoriously slow process that Harry knew well from previous ventures—they built technology to run their own insurance operations efficiently.

“We aren’t an insurtech, we are an insurance company enabled by technology,” Harry emphasizes, drawing a distinction that explains everything about their strategy.

The Broader Pattern

MIC Global’s pivot reveals something important about marketplace dynamics and founder psychology. When you have clear evidence of demand but can’t access supply, the instinct is to find different suppliers or adjust your product to match what existing suppliers offer.

The bolder move is to become the supplier yourself.

This pattern appears across industries. Retailers who couldn’t get products from manufacturers started manufacturing. Software companies frustrated with cloud infrastructure built their own. Netflix couldn’t license enough content, so they started producing originals.

But this strategy only works when you deeply understand the industry you’re disrupting. Harry had twenty years of insurance experience. He knew which parts of the carrier business model were actually hard and which parts were just ossified processes that protected incumbent margins.

The Cost of the Decision

Becoming an insurance carrier isn’t cheap or easy. It requires significant capital, complex licensing, and accepting regulatory scrutiny. MIC Global raised over $13 million in funding, much of which went toward building the infrastructure needed to underwrite and manage risk directly.

They also had to build global partnerships with other insurers to access capacity and place business across multiple markets. The difference was these partnerships operated on MIC Global’s terms, supporting their products rather than dictating what they could offer.

Those nine months of rejection weren’t wasted. They revealed exactly where the market opportunity existed and which incumbents refused to serve it. That clarity made the decision to become a carrier obvious, even if executing it was hard.

What This Means for Other Founders

The lesson isn’t that every B2B company should vertically integrate when partners won’t cooperate. Becoming an insurance carrier requires specific expertise and massive capital.

The lesson is about knowing when you have the right problem with the wrong partners versus the wrong problem entirely. Customer demand plus partner rejection often signals the biggest opportunities—the places where incumbents’ business models prevent them from adapting to new market realities.

Nine months of systematic rejection gave MIC Global perfect clarity about where to build. Sometimes the best pivots aren’t away from what isn’t working. They’re deeper into the fundamental problem that no one else will solve.