We've raised £15m to build a brand new kind of car insurance

Today we have a big announcement. A shout-it-from-the-rooftops kind of announcement.

If you've been loitering in the app or perusing the website over the past few months, you might have seen us talking about a new kind of car insurance.

With a shiny new web page and a brand new section of the app, we've quietly been inviting people to join the waitlist for this soon-to-be-released pay-monthly insurance.

Now, after a ton of work behind the scenes, we're ready to (officially) tell you all about it.

Pay-monthly car insurance with Cuvva: what it is and why we're building it

Cuvva has always been about building uniquely useful insurance products. It's about helping the people who the insurance industry has traditionally left out.

Before we started, there was no way to buy car insurance for an hour.

A day, a week, a month, yes - but not an hour.

So we made it happen.

We made it first, and we made it work differently to typical insurance products. We made it faster, we made it more flexible. It was 21st century insurance in an often horribly outdated industry.

And now we've set our sights on another broken bit of the industry: pay-monthly car insurance.

Why is it broken?

Because, when you pay for car insurance by the month, you're not actually buying a month's worth of car insurance every time.

Instead, think of it more like a loan. You're getting a full year of car insurance. And then your monthly payments are like repayments on a loan.

Those repayments usually come with a pretty hefty interest rate.

That means anyone who can't afford to pay for their car insurance in one lump sum is getting punished. They're getting the same inflexible annual policies, but at a much higher price.

The whole thing - the massive interest rates, the deposits, the credit checks - it all just felt a bit wrong.Not very 2019.

And our customers agreed. That's why many of them were using temporary car insurance to get around it.

They'd buy short-term car insurance for a month, and then renew it as they got to the end of that month.

So we knew there was an opportunity. We knew we could help people get away from all the rubbish bits of paying monthly, without them having to buy 12 monthly short-term car insurance policies.

How it will work

Our pay-monthly car insurance won't be an annual policy dressed up in monthly repayments.

Instead, think of it more like a subscription - like Netflix or Spotify for insurance.

There won't be a deposit, so you won't have to pay for multiple months of insurance up front. And there won't be any interest.

Instead, you'll buy one month at a time, and you'll be able to cancel anytime you want - for free. No hefty cancellation fees here. All you'll have to do is pay up till the end of the month.

You'll be able to pause your subscription in a few taps in the app (or cancel it altogether), and you'll be able to renew it whenever you like.

Plus, we won't use dual pricing - so no punishments for being a loyal customer - and we'll offer no claims bonuses.

How we're going to deliver it

This week, we've told the world about our new round of funding. We've raised £15m ($19m).

We'll be using that money to hire all the brilliant people we need to make our new pay-monthly car insurance a massive success.

We need product specialists to run it.

We need engineers to build it.

We need designers and writers to make it amazing to use.

We need marketers to shout about it.

And we need customer support specialists to answer any questions or concerns you might have.

If you're reading this because you're thinking of applying for a job at Cuvva - apply! (Editor's note: And tell us if our blog posts made up your mind, so we can throw a big party in honour of our content writers.)

Scaling temporary car insurance

That doesn't mean we're going to stop investing in temporary car insurance. Far from it.

This isn't about dropping one product for another one that seems more interesting at the time.

It's about adding rocket fuel to our big, audacious mission.

We are going to be the marketplace for insurance on mobile.

We want Cuvva to be the place where you can get exactly the kind of insurance you want, exactly when you need it.

That might be a pay-monthly car insurance subscription.

It might be an hour's car insurance so you can borrow a friend's car.

When it'll be ready

We're aiming to launch early next year. If you sign up for the waitlist we'll keep you in the loop. You'll be the first to know when it's live.

Thanks for reading this. Especially if you're one of the 250,000 people who decided that the insurance industry wasn't good enough, and decided to trust something new.

Together, we're building insurance the way it should be.