Family-owned since 1984.

How we got here

Insurance demo was founded in 1984 by Helena Ostrowski as a single-agent operation in a small office in Brooklyn. The first policy was for the bagel shop downstairs. Eight years later there were three offices and twenty agents. Twenty-five years later we were licensed in all fifty states.

Through it all, we’ve stayed privately held. Never been acquired. Never gone public. Helena’s son David runs the firm today; her granddaughter Maya is on the board. The third-generation family is involved in day-to-day decisions about which markets to enter, which partnerships to pursue, and how to set claim-payment policy.

What we believe

• Insurance is a promise. The product isn’t paperwork; it’s the assurance that we’ll show up when something goes wrong. Most of what we do is built around that promise.
• Plain language wins. Insurance jargon exists to obscure. Our policies, our guides, and our communications are written so a customer can read them without a lawyer.
• Long relationships matter. 94% retention is the highest in the industry; it’s also the most efficient business model. We’d rather earn 40 years of premiums from 100 customers than 1 year of premiums from 4,000.
• Boring is a feature. Insurance done well is unglamorous. We don’t pivot to viral apps. We don’t do underwriting tricks. We pay claims, plainly, on time.

What we won’t do

• Sell your data. Ever. Anywhere.
• Use AI to deny claims at scale. Every claim that’s denied is reviewed by a human, and the customer gets a written explanation citing the specific policy provision.
• Underwriting tricks. We’ll never lower premiums by writing exclusions you’d only discover at claim time. Our policies are deliberately less excluding than the industry average.
• Predatory non-renewals. We don’t non-renew customers after a single claim. Our threshold is multi-year loss-ratio, not a single bad year.