Cachet, the financial services marketplace for online platform workers, announced on Thursday it secured €1.1 million through its seed funding round, which was led by Icebreaker.vc with participation from previous pre-seed stage investors like Techstars (in a follow-on investment), Barclays and Lemonade Stand as well as angel investors like Chris Adelsbach, UKBAA Angel Investor of the Year 2018/19 and Founding Partner at Outrun Ventures.
Founded in 2018 in Estonia, Cachet provides drivers of ride-hailing platforms with on-demand motor insurance that takes into account hours driven on platforms rather than forcing part-time drivers to pay the full price of monthly insurance.
“We aggregate and enrich cross-market data from gig platforms to enable businesses like insurance companies to sell better priced and personalised coverage based on the gig workers’ real work hours.”
Cachet reported it is already used by drivers of ride-hailing platforms like Uber, Bolt, and Yandex.Taxi on its existing markets in Estonia and Latvia. While sharing more details about the company’s service, Hedi Mardisoo, Co-founder and CEO of Cachet, stated:
“Cachet’s first step has been to create an insurance product that would replace the current inflexible and thus expensive motor insurance and match the workload of ride-hailing drivers. We’ve succeeded in saving our customers on average 50% on their insurance policy by serving as a unique ‘trustee’ data layer between the ride-hailing platforms operating in a market and insurance providers.”
Cachet is currently preparing to expand its service offering from ride-hailing platforms to urban mobility and vacation rental marketplaces and launch in new markets like Poland, the Nordics, and the UK.