ScaleUpSummitNetwork

Miami (Cuemby Direct 2026)

Hopie: manage the ICHRA cycle from end to end

October 7, 2026

Company

Hopie

Founded

2025

City

Miami, FL

#MiamiFL

#Healthtech

#Insurtech

Hopie is building a native AI platform to manage the end-to-end ICHRA lifecycle. The product analyzes real payroll data, structures proposals, incorporates regulatory compliance criteria into the process, supports each employee’s enrollment, and manages monthly premium payments to insurers, so employees do not have to pay upfront. Its model is designed to enable agents to manage ICHRA without having to manually handle the full administrative complexity.

The platform is designed for agents as its distribution channel and employers as its end customers. Agents can use it at no cost, while Hopie charges employers a monthly fee per enrolled employee. The product strategy is based on an idea the company describes as “reduce to expand”: absorbing operational complexity so agents can increase their sales capacity.

When we decided to participate in ScaleUp Summit Network, we were looking to validate technical and product decisions that could become critical as Hopie grew.

Francisco Laprea

CPO & Co-Founder

01 The Problem

We wanted to assess our architecture and priorities from an external perspective, identify risks before they became costly to address, and understand which capabilities we needed to strengthen at an early stage.

Our connection with Cuemby provided exactly that space: to review how we were building, challenge our assumptions, and better prioritize the decisions needed to create a solid, scalable technical foundation that could support the product’s evolution.

02 After TechScore And 1:1 Clinics

After TechScore and the 1:1 conversation, three areas became more important: validation speed, capital efficiency, and compliance from the early stages.

We already had a clear vision of Hopie’s architecture and logic, but our development process was too slow and costly for validating ideas. The work with Cuemby led us to rethink our delivery methodology: instead of investing early in highly complete builds, we now focus on creating functional demos, testing hypotheses quickly, and then deciding where to invest more deeply.

We also realized that we could scale much further with smaller teams, reducing our reliance on large development teams. At the same time, we began integrating security and compliance from the MVP stage rather than treating them as a later phase.

‍

3 questions they are carrying forward

03 Evaluation

To what extent can we turn ICHRA administration into a virtually autonomous system, capable of managing an increasing number of employers and employees without requiring proportional growth in the operations team?

‍

Which parts of the experience should we control directly, and which should we handle through partners to build a scalable platform without sacrificing speed, compliance, or user experience?

‍

How do we turn ICHRA, our current entry point, into the foundation for a broader infrastructure that connects employers, brokers, employees, carriers, and other players across the benefits ecosystem?

Main priorities for the next 6-12 months

04 Roadmap

Validate ICHRA adoption. Define adoption, conversion, usage, and willingness-to-pay metrics to test the model’s assumptions against real-world behavior before expanding commercial reach or launching new product lines.

‍

Strengthen security and compliance. Prioritize controls such as MFA, security testing, disaster recovery, and a realistic compliance roadmap that supports the product’s growth and reduces friction as Hopie moves toward more demanding enterprise relationships.

‍

Formalize delivery and data. Document delivery playbooks, development cycles, and data architecture; establish reliability, monitoring, and review criteria that enable the team to increase volume and complexity without relying on tacit knowledge.

05 Founders

who are the founders?

Valerie Besereni

CEO & Co-Founder

See Profile

Francisco Laprea

CPO & Co-Founder

See Profile

06 Evolution

What does the company aspire to?

In the long term, we aspire for Hopie to become the central platform through which agents, agencies, and employers can manage multiple lines of health insurance and benefits without relying on fragmented systems.ICHRA is our entry point, but the vision is much broader: to integrate ACA/Obamacare, supplemental insurance, life insurance, and other lines into a single experience with intuitive, consistent, and increasingly automated workflows.Although multiple carriers, rules, APIs, and regulatory processes may operate behind the scenes, we want everything to feel like a single system to the user. Hopie would absorb that complexity and transform a fragmented industry into simpler, more connected, and intelligent infrastructure.