Seven Corners

Seven Corners is a Carmel, Indiana-headquartered specialty travel insurance managing general underwriter (MGU), founded in 1993 by Jim Krampen and Justin Tysdal as Specialty Risk International (SRI) and rebranded to Seven Corners in the mid-2000s after rolling up several related travel-insurance businesses under a single brand. Both founders are still at the company — Tysdal as chairman/CEO, Krampen as co-founder — and the business remains privately held, founder-led, and funded from operations (no disclosed venture rounds, no IPO, no private-equity sponsor). Headcount sits in the 200–230 range depending on source.

What it is. Seven Corners is an MGU, not a balance-sheet carrier. It designs the plans, sets the pricing, builds the underwriting guidelines, sells direct to consumers on sevencorners.com, handles 24/7 travel assistance through its in-house Seven Corners Assist team, and adjudicates and pays claims. What it does not do is hold the ultimate underwriting risk — that sits with a panel of carrier partners. The retail U.S.-resident Trip Protection book (Basic, Choice, Economy, Elite) is written on United States Fire Insurance Company paper, a Crum & Forster subsidiary rated A by AM Best, under policy form series T7000 / T210 / TP-401. International travel medical and visitor-to-USA plans (including the long-running Liaison product family) are issued on Certain Underwriters at Lloyd's, London certificates. Third-party broker aggregators additionally list Nationwide, AIG, Virginia Surety, and Fairmont Specialty Group (another C&F division) as historical Seven Corners carrier relationships. The MGU structure means Seven Corners owns the customer, the brand, the claims experience, and the distribution economics; the carriers own the capital, the reinsurance treaties, and the regulatory filings.

Product lines. Four retail product families anchor the book: (1) Trip Protection — cancel/interrupt plans for U.S. residents, including a Cancel for Any Reason upgrade; (2) Travel Medical — high-limit medical plans for outbound U.S. travelers and inbound international visitors to the USA; (3) Liaison — a long-running brand for international travel medical and student travel, including Liaison Student Basic and Plus; and (4) Expat / Reside Worldwide — longer-duration plans for U.S. residents living abroad for a year or more. Government-solutions work sits alongside: Seven Corners is a certified GSA contract provider and administers the Accident and Sickness Program for Exchange Visitors (ASPE), a self-funded limited health benefit plan for U.S. Department of State Exchange Visitors — a book that is TPA rather than insurance.

Distribution and archetype. Seven Corners is a retail / direct-to-consumer specialty travel brand with a travel-agent channel on top. The sales flow is own-website quote-and-bind, comparison marketplaces (Squaremouth, TravelInsurance.com, InsureMyTrip, AARDY), travel-agent referral, and affinity distribution (missionary organizations, study-abroad programs, expatriate communities). It sits in the same functional category as Travelex, Allianz Travel, World Nomads, Berkshire Hathaway Travel Protection, IMG, and WorldTrips — specialty travel insurers competing on product features (medical evacuation caps, pre-existing condition waivers, CFAR availability, refund mechanics) rather than embedded-distribution reach.

Contrast with Cover Genius. The comparison is instructive. Cover Genius is an embedded-insurance-as-a-service infrastructure platform: its product is an API (XCover) that lets Booking.com, Ryanair, Hopper, Intuit, and eBay sell protection at checkout across 60+ countries and all 50 U.S. states under the host's brand, backed by Cover Genius's regulatory licensing and a carrier/Lloyd's back-panel that is deliberately invisible to the end consumer. Cover Genius is ~$245M VC-funded, Sydney/New York, global, partner-sold-only, no D2C brand. Seven Corners is the opposite model on every axis: U.S.-only, founder-owned, bootstrapped-profitable, D2C and travel-agent distribution under its own brand, written on named carrier paper that is disclosed in policy documents, with a 33-year specialty travel focus and no embedded-API strategy. If Cover Genius is the "insurance plumbing behind someone else's booking flow," Seven Corners is the "travel-insurance brand the consumer knowingly buys." Both are MGU-style structures that do not hold balance-sheet risk, but the go-to-market, moat, and failure modes are inverse.

Recognition and coverage. Seven Corners ranks #2 in U.S. News's 11 Best Travel Insurance Companies of 2026 (behind Travelex), wins U.S. News category awards including Best Annual Travel Insurance and Best Travel Insurance for Seniors (2026), and was named "Best Value for Robust Coverage" by Forbes Advisor (2023) for the RoundTrip Choice plan. NerdWallet, MoneyGeek, Upgraded Points, and Squaremouth all carry standing reviews; Travel Weekly has covered the company's hiring and expansion moves (February 2022 Greg Jung promotion to EVP/CGO under president Jeremy Murchland). Trustpilot sits at 4.5 / 5, Squaremouth at 4.38 / 5 — consumer-facing ratings rather than analyst-firm placements. There is no Gartner, Forrester, Celent, or Novarica quadrant presence, which is expected for a D2C specialty retail insurer rather than a platform or enterprise-software vendor.

What it does not do. Seven Corners does not operate an embedded-insurance API, does not power protection in third-party OTA / airline / marketplace checkouts at scale, does not write commercial P&C, does not hold carrier paper on its own balance sheet, and has not announced an AI-underwriting or platform strategy that would broaden it out of travel. It is a focused, founder-led, profitable specialty travel MGU — which is exactly its appeal to the customers who pick it, and exactly the dimension on which it is structurally narrower than a Cover Genius-style platform.