I've spent a lot of time considering how to insure robots. At Google, I led insurance ads products just as Google developed its robotaxi, now called Waymo. I signed deals with the world's largest auto insurers as their executives grappled with autonomous vehicles. What I see now is an industry that needs to reinvent how it models risk.
We are entering the decade of physical AI. Autonomous vehicles, freight trucks, delivery drones, and robots are no longer science fiction — they are products being deployed today and will soon be scaled aggressively. Goldman Sachs projects the robotaxi market alone will reach $400 billion by 2035, and the broader autonomous vehicle market could surpass $5 trillion. When you add autonomous freight, industrial robotics, and delivery robots on top of that, the picture becomes staggering. A massive new economy of machines is coming — machines that will operate in the physical world, cause accidents, and need insurance.
So here's the question: who will underwrite the robots?
The core problem is that insurance policies today are priced against billions of historical claims, but autonomous systems have almost none. On top of that, the risk of an autonomous vehicle or robot is genuinely one of the hardest technical problems I've encountered. You need to understand how the AI models instruct machines to behave, and then simulate thousands of real-world environments — edge cases, adversarial conditions, rare failure modes — to estimate what can go wrong. And here's the kicker: every time the AI model is updated, you have to run those simulations all over again. The risk profile changes with every software release. This is not a one-time underwriting exercise. It is a continuous, technically sophisticated operation at the frontier of AI safety.
This is the problem Valgo's exceptional team is solving.
The Team That Could Only Have Been Built at Stanford
I have an unfair advantage in evaluating this company. Because of my interest in this topic, I've become friends with renowned Stanford Professor Mykel Kochenderfer, one of the world's foremost authorities on AI safety and decision-making under uncertainty. When I asked Mykel about his former student, Robert Moss, his answer was very impressive. Robert was one of the most exceptional students he had taught. He was so thorough, and so intellectually hungry, that Robert wrote his own textbooks for several courses while he was still taking them as a student. That's someone who takes deep personal ownership of learning.
Robert's track record backs up Mykel's enthusiasm. Before Stanford, Robert spent years at MIT Lincoln Laboratory as part of the core team that developed ACAS Xa and Xu — the next-generation airborne collision avoidance system now being certified as the global standard. This was not just a research paper. It was a system that had to win the trust of regulators, airlines, and governments across the world. Robert didn't just build it — he fought to make it the global standard. That's a different kind of grit, the kind that only shows up when you combine deep technical conviction with the will to see something through against enormous institutional resistance.
Co-founder and CTO Sydney Katz is every bit as formidable. A Stanford PhD in Aeronautics and Astronautics and valedictorian of her undergraduate class at Washington University, Sydney was a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford's Intelligent Systems Laboratory, also advised by Mykel Kochenderfer. She herself worked on ACAS X at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, and is co-author of the textbook Algorithms for Validation, published by MIT Press. Her research sits squarely at the intersection of AI safety and system validation — precisely what Valgo does for the insurance industry.
Jon Qian, Valgo's commercial co-founder, is a Stanford GSB Sloan Fellow and a credentialed actuary with over 12 years in insurance leadership. He served as head of corporate development for one of the largest insurers in Asia-Pacific, leading billions in M&A. Jon is the rare bridge between frontier technical research and the C-suite conversations that close enterprise insurance deals. Together, Robert, Sydney, and Jon form one of the most complete founding teams we have ever seen.
A Company Built for Our Thesis
At 1Flourish, we invest at the intersection of physical AI and trust. Our thesis is simple: as AI moves from screens into the physical world — into vehicles, robots, and infrastructure — the need for safety, verification, and accountability becomes existential. Valgo is exactly the kind of company our thesis is built for. It is the risk quantification layer that allows the insurance industry to confidently underwrite autonomous systems, and in doing so, unlocks the capital flows that will allow physical AI to scale safely.
I believe the market for autonomous vehicles, freight, and robots will become one of the largest economic shifts of the next decade. And I believe Valgo will be the foundational infrastructure for how that market earns — and keeps — the world's trust.
We could not be more proud to be on this journey with them.