Cachet, an Estonian insurtech founded by a former banker and an ex-parliamentarian, helps insurance companies create adaptive solutions that bring more flexibility, personalization, and control to digital platforms and their users.
The scale-up, which operates in 11 European markets, including France, where it launched in May, enables improved insurance cover to platform workers, rideshare drivers, couriers, and bike and scooter fleets.
Last year a partnership with TaskRabbit extended the model beyond transport into home services, covering Taskers completing furniture assembly and home repairs across European markets. It has close to 270,000 vehicles on its platform and 150 million European workers.
Cachet offers pricing linked to usage but doesn’t stop there. It builds on that by using technology, analytics, and automation to manage risk continuously, which the scale-up says helps predict and prevent negative outcomes at scale.
It operates as a smart, data-driven and tech-driven distributor for insurance carriers, such as AXA and Waka, Allianz and HDI group as well as local insurance companies.
“Insurance companies want to work with us because we have the capability of making insurance much more flexible and help them to address segments that are more complex and riskier,” says CEO Hedi Mardisoo, who co–founded the company in 2018 with Kalle Palling.
Mardisoo was previously Head of Corporate Affairs at Swedbank and CMO at Starman, a large Estonian telecom. Her co-founder Palling served as a member of the Estonian Parliament from 2007 to 2019.
The pairing is unusual — a financial services executive and a legislator — but the combination turned out to be precisely what the problem required. While in Parliament, Palling was the architect of policy measures that regulated ride-sharing, putting into place standardized licensing and quality processes for private-hire and taxi drivers alike. The question of insurance for ride-hailers, such as Uber drivers, however, was not resolved. That unfinished legislative business became a commercial opportunity.
Mardisoo, for her part, brings an understanding of how financial institutions price risk — and, crucially, why they had failed to update that pricing for this new kind of worker. The problem was not actuarial indifference. It was data starvation.
Cachet solves the issue of a platform worker’s employment-related data being spread across multiple platforms by aggregating that data — building a better picture of worker employment patterns to enable insurers to create fair and flexible policies and cut costs for workers.
In practice, this means Cachet operates as what it calls a “trustee” layer in the middle of a three-way relationship: the worker, the platform, and the insurer. By aggregating and enriching cross-market data from the platforms, Cachet provides a unique view into gig workers’ actual work patterns, enabling insurance companies to sell better-priced and personalized coverage.
“We are all moving around, working in different places, and we leave lots of data behind us, and we’re all very different,” says Mardisoo. Cachet’s data-driven approach allows insurance companies to get more granular, understanding what a person does rather than viewing them solely through generic statistical models.
“Insurance is based on statistical models that account for historical accident rates,” she says. “We take this into account but we also add the layer of personalization by understanding how a person actually behaves and how responsible they are, information which is not normally visible for the insurance carriers. We take that behavioral data together with claims data from the carrier side and put those two things together so when an accident happens, we understand what was the work or usage or driving and we contextualize those things together to find ways to prevent the same accident from happening the next time.”
The way that insurance companies work with Cachet is making insurance fairer, helping insurance companies expand into new areas and is key to helping new platform economy models thrive, says Mardisoo. She encourages insurance companies to also work closely with other startups.
“If you build new businesses using new business models, insurance is actually one of the key things you need but if new forms of insurance are not being introduced with the same speed of innovation, then that actually stops development,” says Mardisoo. “We need insurance companies to work with different startups to help them support the new models and innovation, because, as we have shown, insuring these will actually help them to grow as well.”
The company is unusual in that it scaled from Europe’s smaller countries and is now entering the larger ones. The company was a finalist in the Europas 100 awards in 2024 and awarded the European Start-up Prize for Mobility in 2025, as well as placing runner-up in the Fintech category at the Estonian Startup Awards the same year.
Its closest competitors are incumbent players — global in scope, enterprise-focused, and built on traditional brokerage models, models that Cachet seeks to disrupt.
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