Beyond Cyber, E&O and D&O: the policies Ontario tech founders forget
CGL, property and BOP, IP, business interruption, key person, commercial auto and workers' comp - the coverages that quietly matter once you scale.
Commercial General Liability
General Liability is the coverage that doesn't feel tech-specific until a competitor sues over a marketing claim. CGL covers third-party bodily injury and property damage - the slip-and-fall at the office, the laptop you knock off a client's desk - and, quietly, 'advertising injury,' which defends claims that your marketing disparaged or copied a rival. Those advertising-injury suits are increasingly common in tech, and they get dismissed, but not before they cost five figures to defend.
CGL is also the policy landlords and enterprise contracts require, which is why it is often the very first policy a startup binds. It is cheap, it is expected, and it leaves the tech-specific exposure - your product and your data - entirely untouched.
Property and the Business Owners Policy
A Business Owners Policy bundles general liability with property cover - laptops, monitors, servers, the contents of your office. For a remote-first team it can feel redundant, but founders routinely discover too late that a homeowner's or tenant's policy excludes business property, and that a single stolen laptop bag is a real loss.
A BOP is worth a few hundred dollars a year once you have a premises or meaningful equipment. The trap is assuming the property limit on a generic BOP extends to the things a tech company actually values - data and code - which it does not. Those are Cyber and Tech E&O exposures.
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Intellectual property insurance
Tech companies are built on IP, and IP is where the expensive arguments happen. Intellectual property insurance defends infringement claims - someone alleging your product or training data used theirs - and, in some forms, funds the enforcement of your own patents and trademarks against copyists. Investors notice robust IP protection because it signals a defensible moat; insurers notice the absence of it when a claim arrives.
For an AI company the IP exposure runs through training data, which a standard Tech E&O's IP carve-back can exclude. An AI E&O endorsement that extends to training-data infringement is the policy that closes that gap.
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Business interruption
Business interruption pays the income you lose when a covered event stops you operating - and, in its contingent form, the income you lose when a vendor you depend on goes down. For a tech company whose product is uptime, the contingent form is the one that matters: your billing vendor, your cloud region, your file-transfer SaaS. MOVEit taught the market that a vendor's breach is your customer's problem, and yours.
The trigger to insist on is a supply-chain definition inside the contingent-BI endorsement that names vendor and sub-processor breaches. Without it, the contingent loss can be denied even when the direct loss would have paid.
Key person and benefits
Key-person insurance is life cover on the founder or a critical engineer whose loss would threaten the company's survival or its valuation. Investors at Series A and later frequently require it as a condition of funding - the company pays the premium and is the beneficiary, because the company is the entity that absorbs the loss of the person.
On the talent side, a competitive benefits and pension package is what lets a startup hire against incumbents for the same role. Group benefits aren't 'insurance' in the liability sense, but they are part of the same risk-and-talent stack a tech company manages as it scales.
Commercial auto and workers' compensation
The moment a founder or employee drives for the business - a delivery, a site visit, a client meeting with equipment - personal auto insurance may not respond. Commercial auto covers that gap, and for startups it is usually a small line item until a fleet appears.
In Ontario, workers' compensation is administered through the WSIB, and coverage is mandatory for most employers the day the first employee is hired in an insurable role. It is a compliance requirement, not a risk-management choice, and it is one of the few tech-insurance-adjacent obligations that can't be deferred.
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General information only. Not insurance advice.