Adapting Commercial Auto Insurance to Platform-Based Work

with Dan Bratshpis from INSHUR

Dan Bratshpis is CEO and Co-founder of INSHUR, a digital-first commercial auto insurance platform embedded into gig-economy platforms including Uber, Amazon, and DoorDash. He started his career in equities trading at Lehman Brothers before pivoting to insurance after identifying a massive underserved market among app-based rideshare and delivery drivers. Today INSHUR operates across 50 US states and the UK with a focus on usage-based, data-led commercial auto coverage.

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In Episode 173 of the InsurTech Geek Podcast, Dan Bratshpis — CEO and co-founder of INSHUR — joins host Rob Galbraith to share how his background in technology, finance, and insurance led him to rethink commercial auto coverage for the modern mobility economy. From his days on Wall Street to building one of the leading embedded insurance platforms for Uber, Amazon, and DoorDash, Dan explains why traditional insurance models fall short for gig workers — and what a truly usage-based, data-led approach looks like in practice.

From Cab Rides to Cloud APIs: The Origin Story of INSHUR

Dan Bratshpis didn’t set out to build an insurance company. After a career in equities trading at Lehman Brothers — later acquired by Barclays and then Bank of America — he found himself evaluating a family member’s insurance agency in New York that catered to immigrant taxi and rideshare drivers. What he found surprised him: a massive, underserved market still operating on paper forms and phone calls in an era when Uber drivers were expecting app-based everything.

The founding thesis of INSHUR was straightforward but ambitious: bring digital transparency and fair pricing to commercial auto insurance for the emerging class of gig-economy drivers. In 2016, Dan and his co-founder launched with a Kayak-style aggregator model. It failed almost immediately. Their pivot strategy: get burner phones, sign up for rideshare promotions, and spend hours riding around New York interviewing drivers about their insurance pain points firsthand. That feedback loop convinced them to abandon the aggregator model and become an MGA — building their own underwriting capability, their own pricing, and eventually their own claims organization.

“We launched the app and we thought, OK, amazing — we’re going to have thousands of signups. And it’s just crickets.”

Today INSHUR operates across 50 US states and the UK, and has expanded from rideshare into last-mile delivery, car-share, and emerging autonomous vehicle coverage — all rooted in the same founding principle: insurance should work the way customers actually live.

The Platform Playbook: Embedding Insurance Into Uber, Amazon, and DoorDash

INSHUR’s defining strategic move wasn’t a product innovation — it was a distribution one. Rather than acquiring customers directly, the company chose to embed itself into the onboarding journeys of major gig-economy platforms. When a new driver signs up for Uber in the US or UK, or when an Amazon Flex delivery driver activates their account, INSHUR’s coverage is integrated seamlessly into that process. The platform handles the acquisition. INSHUR handles the risk.

The model creates a symbiotic relationship that’s hard for traditional insurers to replicate. Platforms get proof of coverage in real time, reducing friction in their driver activation pipelines. INSHUR gets access to behavioral and operational data — trip counts, active hours, delivery volumes — that enables more precise underwriting than a traditional annual policy could ever achieve.

“We get access to a lot of alternative data. We use that data to price and underwrite in new ways.”

When COVID-19 collapsed rideshare demand in 2020, INSHUR’s platform-first approach proved its resilience. As their driver customers pivoted from rideshare to delivery, INSHUR followed — launching last-mile delivery products and securing partnerships with Amazon and DoorDash. What might have been a fatal blow became a strategic expansion.

What Autonomous Vehicles Mean for Commercial Auto Insurance

Dan Bratshpis is thinking about something most commercial auto insurers aren’t: what happens when the thing being insured rarely causes accidents? Autonomous vehicles don’t text and drive. They don’t get tired. And while they’re not infallible today, the trend is clear — frequency of accidents will drop as AVs proliferate.

For an industry that has historically priced commercial auto around the assumption of human error, the implications are significant. At INSHUR, the opportunity is being pursued from a different angle: coverage not just for the AV itself in operation, but for the support ecosystem surrounding it — maintenance, cleaning, repair, and downtime. These are risks that exist now and will grow alongside the AV fleet, but for which standard commercial products don’t yet exist.

“The frequency will certainly go down. And I think the insurance industry hasn’t really moved quick enough to develop those products.”

The broader lesson is one of proactive adaptation. Those who have already built the flexibility — usage-based billing systems, embedded distribution channels, proprietary claims infrastructure — will be best positioned to navigate the shift when AV penetration forces a reckoning across the commercial auto market.

Key Takeaways

✅ Embedded distribution changes everything: INSHUR’s platform partnerships with Uber, Amazon, and DoorDash remove acquisition friction and provide real-time behavioral data — enabling underwriting accuracy that traditional annual policies simply can’t match.

✅ Usage-based insurance is a necessity, not a feature: For gig workers living paycheck to paycheck, flexible pay-per-use coverage is the difference between being insured and not. Annual policies don’t fit non-traditional work patterns.

✅ Claims infrastructure is the real competitive moat: INSHUR’s decision to build its claims organization in-house turned a cost center into a core differentiator — because when something goes wrong, claims IS the product.

✅ Autonomous vehicles will reshape commercial auto pricing: The carriers who haven’t already built flexible cost structures and usage-based products will face existential pressure when AV penetration drives down accident frequency at scale.