A ride can arrive at the touch of a screen. The insurance required to earn money giving that ride once demanded rather more ceremony: paperwork, a broker’s office, another visit with the document you had forgotten. Dan Bratshpis saw the mismatch from unusually close quarters. His family knew the taxi trade. He knew what software had already done to financial markets. Somewhere between those two worlds sat a business waiting for its paperwork to catch up.
Bratshpis came to the United States from Russia as a child. Many men in his family drove cabs at some point as they established themselves in America. The taxi was a means of making a living and getting a foothold. That history gives his interest in commercial driving a particular weight: the customer at the other end of the application is doing work his own family understood.
His route to insurance took a detour through Wall Street. A Cornell University graduate, he worked in technology at Merrill Lynch; his career included helping equities trading move from human processes toward algorithms. It was an education in what happens when an established business discovers that software can change the machinery underneath it, rather than merely improve the view from reception.
Then a relative who had invested in a transportation insurance agency asked him to help with its technology. He found a large industry still asking customers to tolerate old habits. New arrivals were driving for Uber and Lyft, running their working lives through their phones. To buy insurance, they were being invited back into the age of the filing cabinet. It was a peculiar place to park the future.
A clever app meets an obstinate fax
INSHUR began in New York in 2016. Bratshpis joined forces with David Daiches, whose work on OpenUnderwriter had addressed the practical business of helping brokers transact online. Daiches later recalled that Bratshpis contacted him after seeing the software; they met in London within days. One founder had seen the problem at the counter. The other had been building tools that could help remove it.
The early business aggregated insurance options. A mobile interface could make shopping easier, but the arrangement left the underlying processes largely in other hands. Daiches recalled asking insurers for more flexibility and being offered a dedicated fax machine. There are few more eloquent replies to a digital ambition. The founders needed authority over more of the transaction if they wanted to change its pace.
They moved toward operating as a managing general agent, or MGA: a business with delegated insurance responsibilities, including underwriting, supported by insurance capacity partners. In October 2017, INSHUR announced a strategic partnership with Munich Re’s Digital Partners. Its announcement said a quote could take as little as 171 seconds. That was an early product claim, with a precise date attached, rather than a promise about every application today.
For Bratshpis, the practical attraction was time returned to the customer. A professional driver cannot earn fares while sitting in an insurance office. A shorter application has an economic purpose beyond looking modern. The distinction matters in his story because so much of his subsequent work follows the same question: which part of this process is keeping somebody from working?
The shortest quote time reported in INSHUR’s Munich Re partnership announcement. An early benchmark, dated to its launch era.
Go where the driver already is
The company entered the UK market in 2018. Its early expansion brought outside backing: a February 2019 report described $7 million in Series A equity funding led by Munich Re Ventures, with MTech Capital participating, alongside a $2 million credit facility. Those are company financing figures. The more revealing development was the decision to work alongside the platforms supplying drivers with their jobs.
INSHUR’s Uber relationship became part of a broader approach called embedded insurance. In plain English, the insurance offer appears within, or connects closely to, a service the customer already uses. The attraction is easy to understand. A driver joining a platform has a reason to arrange cover at that moment. Sending that person on a separate expedition introduces another opportunity for the working day to disappear.
Bratshpis has written about the need to design these products around real working patterns. Amazon Flex’s UK Pay as you Flex product uses an insurance wallet and by-the-minute cover for courier work. The unit of attention becomes the work being performed. An occasional delivery shift and a full working week can call for different arrangements; a product earns its place by noticing the difference.
The platform relationship also supplies information about the work: trips, locations, hours and other operational data, alongside conventional insurance information. Bratshpis’s argument is that this can improve how risk is understood and priced. It remains an argument for careful insurance design, with each product subject to its own terms and market. A convenient purchase button is only the visible part of a much longer calculation.
The part of the promise that happens later
Buying cover is the opening conversation. A claim is where the promise becomes expensive and personal. INSHUR established its own New York claims agency in 2020 and subsequently extended its UK claims capabilities. That gave the business more involvement after a policy had been sold. For a driver whose vehicle supports their income, the quality of that later conversation has obvious consequences.
In April 2023, Bratshpis’s company acquired American Business Insurance Services. ABI had been established in 1983 and insured more than 50,000 vehicles across the United States. The deal paired INSHUR’s technology and platform relationships with an existing national transportation insurance operation. There is a pleasing practicality to buying forty years of experience while pursuing the next version of an industry.
Nationwide reach still involved local execution. In September 2023, INSHUR announced its livery insurance launch in Arizona, describing it as its second US state for that offering after New York. That distinction helps explain the business: an acquired national operation and the rollout of a particular product are different milestones. Expansion means doing the detailed work market by market, even when the map looks satisfyingly large.
The organization behind that map also needed people who understood claims. In August 2023, INSHUR appointed Chris Wells, previously at Munich Re and GEICO, to lead its owned claims administrator, Genoteq. Bratshpis’s project had moved well beyond a neat application screen. It now included the less photogenic work of integrating teams, handling incidents and making the insurance operation function after the customer pressed buy.
Growing up means doing the arithmetic
The next rounds of financing tell a story of scale, with an increasingly explicit emphasis on discipline. INSHUR announced $19 million in October 2024, led by Viola Growth with participation from MS&AD Ventures and existing investors. Natalie Refuah, a general partner at Viola Growth, was named as the incoming board chair. For Bratshpis, the company’s circle now extended from family taxi work to institutional investors and international insurance partners.
In July 2025, INSHUR announced a further $35 million capital raise from Trinity Capital. It set out plans for US expansion, artificial intelligence research and autonomous vehicle insurance. The announcement described profitability as an objective. Capital raised, revenue targets and profits achieved belong in separate columns; the language of the announcement leaves that distinction intact.
By then, the company reported passing one million policies sold in the UK and 25 million hours of Pay as you Flex cover. The two numbers measure different things. Policies are transactions over time, rather than a count of individual people. Covered hours describe usage. Together they show how far the business had travelled from its initial New York application without pretending to describe the founder’s personal fortune.
Bratshpis’s public advice to founders is correspondingly practical: understand customers closely, concentrate spending where it creates value and take financial discipline seriously. That makes a useful companion to the family origin. An affinity with drivers explains why he cared about the problem. The arithmetic determines whether a company can keep solving it. Sympathy is a fine beginning for a business; it still has to pay its bills.
One car, and then the road ahead
His latest work keeps returning to gaps between the way vehicles are used and the way insurance is packaged. In August 2026, INSHUR announced a US commercial auto program with Mobilitas providing capacity and Incline serving as the fronting carrier. The partners described a route to expanding an existing regional program, with platform data central to the intended approach to pricing and underwriting.
September brought a Turo announcement for Period X, an off-rental product covering eligible activities between bookings, including cleaning, maintenance and staging. It was offered without a fleet-size minimum. Bratshpis explained that hosts begin with one car before building their operations. The observation is unadorned, and all the better for it. A business owner with a single vehicle has already started, even if the insurance market prefers a larger customer.
“Everyone starts with one car before they scale.”Dan Bratshpis · September 2026
Beyond those immediate products sits the question of vehicles that drive themselves. INSHUR appointed ManyPets co-founder Guy Farley to its UK advisory board in September 2025 to help assess its technology plans, including AI and autonomous vehicles. Bratshpis has also argued publicly that insurance must prepare for responsibility distributed among platforms, fleets, maintenance providers and technology companies. His interest is in the system around mobility as well as the person at the wheel.
It is a considerable distance from the family cab to a debate about autonomous fleets. Yet the connecting thread is unusually clear. People find a new way to make money with a vehicle; insurance has to understand what they are actually doing. Bratshpis has spent a decade working on that adjustment. The useful measure of the ambition remains close to home: how much easier does it become for someone to get properly covered and get on with the day?