Cachet, an Estonian-founded financial services marketplace for online platform workers, has closed a €1.1 million seed round as it prepares to expand its service offering from rideshare platforms to other fields and launch in new markets like Poland, the Nordic countries and the United Kingdom.
Founded in 2018 in Estonia, the company has been providing drivers of ride-hailing platforms with on-demand motor insurance that takes into account the hours driven on platforms rather than forcing part-time drivers to pay the full price of monthly insurance.
“The company achieves this by aggregating and enriching cross-market data from the platforms to provide a unique view into gig workers’ actual work patterns and enable insurance companies to sell better-priced and personalised coverage,” the company said in a statement.
Cachet says it is already used by drivers of ride-hailing platforms like Uber, Bolt and Yandex.Taxi on its existing markets in Estonia and Latvia, with the platforms trusting the data needed to provide insurance coverage with Cachet.
The company plans to use the new funding to expand its services across the Nordic countries as well as the United Kingdom and Poland. It’s also looking to add further services catering to the sharing economy like urban mobility and vacation rental marketplaces, it said.
The seed round is led by Icebreaker.vc and includes previous pre-seed stage investors like Techstars, Barclays and Lemonade Stand as well as many angel investors.
“The number of people working part-time or full-time for online platforms like Uber, Airbnb or Fiverr has more than doubled in the last three years. The COVID-related economic slowdown is bound to accelerate it further,” Hedi Mardisoo, a co-founder and the CEO of the company, said.
“However, platform workers are currently underserved by financial services providers. This means that platform workers often have the choice of either buying expensive coverage or simply not working,” Mardisoo added.
Cover: The founders of Cachet, Hedi Mardisoo and Kalle Palling. Photos by Cachet.
