Earlier this year, the JPMorgan Chase Institute put out some new data highlighting that nearly 1% of US adults earned income through a sharing or on-demand economy platform in Sept. 2015.
The large majority of participants came from “capital platforms” like AirBnB, where income supplemented existing pay, rather than being earned by labor as it is on Uber.
But another less glamorous subset of companies is increasingly looking to provide the infrastructure to enable these services. In 2011, Chris Dixon of Andreessen Horowitz wrote about the “pickaxes” opportunity that follows most major technology trends:
“For most technology trends, the number of successful companies created in gold mining and pickaxes are comparable, yet the gold mining businesses tend to get much more attention.”
Insurance falls into this bucket. Recently, Intact Financial backed Uber per-mile insurance partner Metromile, while health insurance broker Stride has formed partnerships with marketplaces TaskRabbit and Postmates. Now a crop of new startups are targeting coverage opportunities in the sharing economy.
Our latest graphic highlights some of the insurance tech startups targeting the on-demand economy.
