How Corgi Funds Plans to Chase Down Wall Street’s Top Dogs

Corgi Funds is following in the footsteps of its furry namesake: it’s small, surprisingly fast and not afraid to take on the biggest dogs on the block.

The newcomer issuer has certainly been making waves in the asset management industry in recent months by standing up an unprecedented number of funds and filings. After introducing one fund in December, Corgi launched 187 exchange-traded funds this year, roughly one in five of some 882 total launches in the US during the same time, according to data from CFRA. Its parent company, the San Francisco-based Corgi Insurance, is a Y Combinator-backed artificial intelligence insurance start-up that was founded in 2024 and raised more than $268 million as of its Series B funding round in May. 

As expected, the company has many of the attributes we’ve come to associate with Silicon Valley. It’s largely made up of people in their late 20s, and CEO Nico Laqua recently told Forbes he often sleeps in the “Founders’ Room” at the office where his team works seven days a week. The company has even opened 24/7 cafés à la Capital One where people can come up with their best ideas at all hours, even if it’s 2 a.m.

Many of the young workers at Corgi grew up investing in ETFs on platforms like Robinhood, said Edward Rumell, head of distribution at Corgi Funds, who joined the firm this year after roughly 18 years in the ETF industry. So after finding efficiencies and a way to launch a large family of low-cost ETFs, they jumped on the opportunity. “We feel like we’re doing a favor to the industry by coming out and launching low-cost funds,” Rumell told ETF Upside. “At the end of the day, we’re just trying to give another option.” 

The Fast and the Furriest 

ETF launches are on track for another record-breaking year, thanks in part to issuers playing with ways to bring exciting investing themes, such as blockbuster IPOs and surging interest in artificial intelligence and crypto, to investors in an ETF wrapper. But Corgi’s listing pace is “unprecedented,” said Aniket Ullal, CFRA’s head of ETF research. 

Rumell said thematic launches are top of mind for the company, pointing to the Corgi SK Hynix 2x Daily ETF that hit the market last month when the South Korean chipmaker SK Hynix listed American depositary receipts. While those thematic funds are more or less built for retail investors, he puts the buffer ETFs (which the firm wants to be known for) in the institutional camp. Corgi reviews 13F reports and data from WhaleWisdom to find out who owns those products, and has its sales team in Chicago calling advisors. The firm is offering its buffer ETFs at 30 basis points, significantly lower than the 80 to 90 basis points you’ll find from the major players.  

“We feel like we can offer a better product at a cheaper cost,” Rumell said. Moving forward, he’s most excited about the low-cost core ETFs the firm is planning to launch in September, which he hopes will help it compete with the Vanguards and the BlackRocks of the world. “We want to have a holistic menu that encompasses the whole universe — whether it’s core, satellite, thematics — where it could be a one-stop shop where advisors can go find low-cost ETFs and create their model portfolios.”

But the sheer volume of funds Corgi is launching to reach that goal has made experts skeptical. “Our team has talked for a long time about the spaghetti cannon approach to product development, and Corgi’s strategy appears to follow the same mold, but on a scale we haven’t previously seen,” said Zachary Evens, manager research analyst for Morningstar. “It is not free to launch an ETF so they are effectively betting that a few funds collecting tons of assets will supplement those languishing with few assets. They’re spreading their bets far and wide, hoping for the best opportunity for success with a few of these.” 

It’s a risky strategy, unless you have a source of asset-gathering already identified and committed, Ullal said. In other words, some of these funds could likely fail. 

• There has traditionally been a $100 million survivor threshold for a product to be considered successful, and Corgi Funds’ total AUM at the end of July was approximately $811 million. 
• More than half ($417.38 million) is in the Corgi Lithography & Semiconductor Photonics ETF (EUV). But the firm doesn’t have a vision of closing any of its funds, Rumell said. 

“We feel the ideas that we’re launching out there make sense,” he said. Though with a plan to have more than 500 ETFs on the market by this time next year, he also recognizes the reality that some funds will catch on and some will not. “But we don’t foresee ourselves closing any of our funds down, especially not in the first year or two, as that would be kind of launch suicide.”

Did Someone Say Cats? While competitors will be watching for how sustainable this strategy is, “I don’t expect many copycats in the near future because of the effort and capital required to stand up so many new funds,” Evens said. “Corgi is clearly committed to this approach and will serve as a test case for other asset managers contemplating the same.”