Today, I'm delighted to – finally(!) – tell you about Trov’s partnership with Waymo, Alphabet’s self-driving technology unit, and with it our entry into the world of On-Demand Insurance for personal mobility.

In 2016, I visited Google’s HQ and shared a meal with Loren Nickel, their head of business risk and insurance. During lunch I asked him to consider applying Trov’s on-demand, micro duration InsurTech in the context of an autonomous vehicle ride. For over a year our team had argued that traditional insurance approaches would be inadequate for emerging technologies and that Trov’s tech could be leveraged to address the unique opportunities these technologies surfaced.

For the past 15 months, Trov and Waymo have been working together to develop the world's first trip protection for people using their soon-to-be-launched ride-hailing service.

As I noted in today's press release, it’s critical for the future of insurance to keep up with the future of transportation. This future, enabled by ride-hailing and fueled by consumer behavior, is one where riding in a driverless car is an everyday, normal activity. The unique coverages and the innovative technology required to insure passengers and things in the new world of autonomous transportation have never existed.

Our software engineers adapted Trov’s “human-triggered” insurance to be software triggered, creating a more precise cover for passengers in an intelligent driverless car. Our insurance wizards huddled with our innovative underwriting partner Munich Re to develop the most comprehensive protections, from lost items to medical well-being, that could be offered to any passenger in a Waymo-equipped vehicle on a trip-by-trip, mile-by-mile basis.

And so was born Trov trip protection – our first instantiation of On-Demand Insurance for personal mobility, a seamless experience where passengers are provided coverages for each trip. Our whole team is excited to be partnering with the world’s leader in self-driving automobile technology, and also for what it means for Trov.

What this means for Trov

Our partnership highlights an important next step in Trov’s expanding footprint. On-Demand Insurance for personal mobility is a natural progression for us as we build a platform that enables an increasingly smarter and more contextual cover. The investments we’re making in the Trov app - and its underlying software micro-components - provide the foundation for developers to harness some of the most interesting and useful of those components. As a result, the “platformization” and partnerships extend Trov’s utility from not only a popular consumer application but also to an expanding B2B platform.

We've built a platform for the modern era of risk where the interactions between humans and machines are increasing (which complements our mission to build software at the intersection of people and things). Soon we'll introduce more partnerships and features spawned from these innovations we’re calling “machine-triggered, contextual cover.” Trov’s platform will use signals of “state change” that come from any source (smartphone, wearable, beacon, etc.) to trigger the best-fit coverage for that context in real time.

This is just the beginning of leveraging our micro-duration, On-Demand Insurance platform in the unfolding world of machine intelligence and personal mobility—a completely unexplored territory in the insurance industry (and for that matter, in every other industry).

I couldn’t be happier to end 2017 with an announcement like this. Looking forward, our Trov Application will remain at the core of all our innovations, and in 2018 we’ll release important new capabilities, launch new geographies (yes, USA is just around the corner), additional product categories, and brilliant new partners. We have an ambitious roadmap ahead as we continue to build the insurance technology needed to help people feel safe and cared for in a world of ever-greater dependence on machines.

Thanks for joining us on the journey...which now includes an entirely new way to get us where we intend to go... Onward!

This article was originally featured on Trov’s blog.