The Insurance Company Hiding in the Checkout

A Turo host has two businesses on the same driveway. One is a car available for a guest’s trip. The other is a car sitting idle, being cleaned, moved, stored or driven between rentals. The insurance that protects a guest’s trip does not automatically settle every question about the hours around it. That untidy interval is where Tint’s story begins.

Matheus Riolfi and Jérôme Selles encountered the problem while building insurance capabilities at Turo. They saw how hard it was to connect a modern marketplace to the older machinery of carriers, filings, policies and claims. In 2018 they founded Tint to build that machinery once and reuse it for other platforms. The irony is tidy: years later, Turo became a Tint partner.

The missing hours

A conventional insurer begins with a category: personal auto, commercial auto, homeowners, cargo. A platform begins with an event: a trip starts, a guest checks in, a car is loaded onto a transporter. The category and the event do not always meet neatly. Tint’s business is to draw a useful boundary around the event and build coverage that can be offered there.

With Turo, that meant an off-trip program for hosts whose vehicles need coverage outside guest trips. Tint says participating hosts save an average of $951 per vehicle per year compared with personal insurance alternatives. The figure comes from its own case study, so it describes that program and comparison, not a universal saving. The product also offers deductible choices, telematics and non-telematics options, and coverage across 48 U.S. states and Canada.

This is what Tint means by embedded insurance. The customer is already on a platform doing something that creates a specific exposure. The coverage appears in that workflow, using information the platform already knows. It saves the customer a hunt for a separate product; it saves the platform from sending a buyer away at the most relevant moment. It does not save anyone from the obligations of an actual insurance program.

The button has a back office

Embedded insurance is often presented as a checkout trick. Tint’s more consequential work happens after and before the button. Its operating system covers underwriting and rating, policy administration, claims, payments, documents and partner APIs. Underwriting teams can adjust eligibility or rate tables without waiting for a software release; claims can move from first notice of loss through payment in one workflow. A no-code interface and API give partners different ways to connect.

Tint also acts as a managing general agent. It designs and operates programs with carrier backing, handles regulatory work and administers claims. For a brand partner, that means a route to offer coverage without becoming an insurer. For a program builder, Tint also sells access to the infrastructure it uses on its own programs. That combination is its clearest competitive distinction: it has to live with the operational decisions its software makes possible.

“We built the technology so we could run better programs. We run the programs so we can build better technology.”

Matheus Riolfi, co-founder and CEO

The price of all this is less tidy. Tint does not publish a company-wide fee schedule for building a program. Premiums and protection fees vary by coverage and partner. Its SmartSTR enrollment page, for instance, displays per-night and per-stay choices for a particular property partner; those are product prices, not a rate card for Tint’s platform. The meaningful cost question for a potential partner is broader: integration, carrier capacity, compliance, claims service and whatever risk the partner chooses to retain.

Three risks, three shapes

Consider uShip, the marketplace for moving large and awkward things. A damaged item is an ordinary hazard of its trade. The company already had years of claims history and wanted greater control over protection and pricing. Tint helped it design a program in which uShip retained more risk. Tint’s case study reports a tenfold return on investment in the first few months. That result depends on uShip’s own transaction history and low damage rate; it is a case, not a promise to the next marketplace in line.

Now consider a short-term rental. A standard homeowners policy can leave a host exposed when paying guests arrive. Tint’s SmartSTR product is built for that booking-shaped risk, including options for guest-caused damage, bed bugs and liability. OwnerRez and Escapia brought SmartSTR into property management workflows in 2025. Escapia said its network reached more than 900 property management companies. The obvious attraction is less re-entry: the software already knows about the stays.

TrustedTransport takes the same idea to a vehicle being shipped. Coverage is selected per vehicle and per load, with shipment data supplied by the transport management system. Tint advertises a $100 deductible and up to $200,000 per eligible vehicle, subject to the policy’s limits and exclusions. The fine point is the timing: a shipper can buy protection when a specific load exists, instead of arranging a blanket annual product for an unknown parade of cars.

From one hard problem to a larger one

Tint raised a $25 million Series A led by QED Investors in 2021 and says it has raised $30 million in total. It reported sevenfold growth in 2024. In August 2026 it announced a No. 242 place on the Inc. 5000, citing 1,410% revenue growth over three years, profitability and more than $100 million in gross written sales powered for partners. Those are company-reported milestones, but they also show why the unglamorous back office now matters to more than a handful of platforms.

The company has widened its brief. Tint Studio, launched in 2025, brings specialty underwriters, insurers and digital brands together to validate demand and develop programs. Its newer platform language leans into AI-assisted risk scoring and claims triage. The useful test is the ordinary one: whether a correct policy is issued, a change is recorded, and a claim is handled without making the customer decode the organizational chart.

A platform could try to build this itself. The founders did, once. A traditional broker or carrier can also provide parts of the solution, and other embedded insurance companies compete for similar work. Tint’s wager is that a platform should spend its scarce attention on the risk it understands best and rent the insurance machinery around it. That is most plausible when the platform has a recurring transaction, reliable data and enough volume to justify a tailored program. A small, irregular audience with scant risk history may find an off-the-shelf policy simpler.

The part another operator can copy is the order of work. Identify the risk in one transaction. Check whether your own data can describe it well enough to price and administer. Ask customers where the current policy fails, then test a narrow coverage with a carrier and claims team before dressing it up as a feature. uShip had the loss history to retain more risk; Turo had host behavior to design around. Without that evidence, a pleasing checkout can become an expensive guess.

There is a lesson here beyond insurance. The first thing a platform notices is a missing button. The expensive discovery comes later: the button implies a policy, a regulator, a reserve, a claims adjuster and a human being waiting for a decision. Tint started on that far side of the click. Its success depends on keeping the invisible parts as carefully designed as the visible one.