Dakotah Rice founded Harper in 2024 alongside Tushar Nair, a longtime friend and former Goldman Sachs colleague, building what the company describes as a fully autonomous, AI-native commercial insurance brokerage. Rice’s motivation traces back to his childhood in rural Alabama, where he watched his father run a nightclub, his uncle operate a trucking fleet, and his mother provide home health services while working two jobs alone to support him. He has spoken publicly about the hardship of that upbringing, including nights without electricity, and has described watching his uncle’s trucking business collapse not from bad management but from insurance and financing costs that crushed it before it had a real chance.
Rice studied at Brown University before building a career in high finance, spending time at Goldman Sachs, private equity firm Carlyle, and four years at hedge fund Coatue as an investment analyst. He later enrolled at Harvard Business School but did not complete the program, instead founding an investment company called Poolit, which he shut down in 2023 after struggling to make it profitable, a failure he has discussed candidly, saying his ego made it hard to accept at the time. After Poolit wound down, Rice and Nair joined an Antler residency in spring 2024, where they explored ideas before settling on Harper, named after Rice’s mother’s maiden name.
Harper’s model replaces the traditional brokerage process, in which Rice says weeks of calls and confusing paperwork are standard, with AI systems that read insurance applications, manage quotes, route submissions to underwriters, and match businesses with more than 160 carriers, delivering coverage in as little as one to two days versus the traditional five to seven. The company covers general liability, professional liability, garage liability, commercial auto, commercial property, cyber, and umbrella policies, and unlike software vendors selling AI tools to existing brokerages, Harper operates as the licensed brokerage itself, owning the customer relationship directly.
The company went through Y Combinator’s Winter 2025 batch and has scaled rapidly, growing more than 100-fold in its first year and reaching more than 5,000 businesses across 35 states within thirteen months of launch, alongside reported annual recurring revenue that grew from zero to roughly $5 million in a matter of months and later to $8 million. In 2026, Harper raised a combined $46.8 million Series A and seed round led by Emergence Capital, reported as the largest publicly disclosed Series A ever raised by a Black founder. Rice has framed Harper’s mission as extending Fortune 500-caliber insurance service to the manufacturers, healthcare facilities, and fleet operators that make up the backbone of the American small business economy, the same businesses he watched struggle against an insurance system built without them in mind.
