Startup Zego has raised just over £1 million in seed funding from investors, including LocalGlobe, with FTSE 100 company Aviva, for an “insurtech” product for gig economy delivery drivers.
According to Tech Crunch, while companies like Uber and Deliveroo are getting bigger, the issue of insuring all of their drivers , or the workers finding insurance for themselves, has become a pressing issue.
Zego is an “insurtech” company — an insurance product distributed by a tech platform/app—that offers a “pay-as-you-go” system that manages all of the customer’s information from sales, payment management and the backend processes. It then links the data to the insurance/capacity providers (in this case Aviva).
The backend platform also automates many of the broker processes, reducing the expenses and additional costs between the insured and the provider, as well as timestamps exactly when the drivers are working/not working, links that to the insurer, and thus ensures that the drivers have suitable insurance coverage for the work that they are doing.
While Cuvva is a similar product, it is for leisure use while Zego is for delivery purposes, which is a more tightly regulated market.
Fees for the scooter policy start from 65p an hour up to £25 a week, while insuring a car can cost as little as £1 an hour. To date, Zego has written 400,000 hours of coverage for drivers.
The company’s founders are Harry Franks, who worked at a senior level at Deliveroo and before that luxury rental business onefinestay; Sten Saar worked for onefinestay and later developed operations at Deliveroo; and Stuart Kelly, who was lead developer at Mainframe and then head of engineering at start-up Hubble.