Lemonade, the insurance startup founded by Daniel Schreiber and Shai Wininger, has today announced a $300 million Series D financing led by the SoftBank Group, with participation from Allianz, General Catalyst, GV, OurCrowd and Thrive Capital.
Lemonade uses an AI-powered bot to digitize the insurance-buying experience for renters and home owners. Users simply download the app and answer a few questions before getting a quote, which starts at $5/month but can surely go up based on a number of factors, including how much personal property one owns.
The company has also differentiated itself from traditional insurance providers by integrating a giveback system directly into the product. Lemonade takes a fixed slice of users’ monthly payment as revenue, and sets the rest aside for claims. Unclaimed premiums go to the user’s charity of choice.
The company has grown significantly since launch, last year hitting $57 million in revenue. Co-founder and CEO Schreiber says the company is on track to do $100 million in revenue this year, and that they’ve sold 500,000 policies to date.
The investment is meant to help Lemonade expand beyond the U.S., with sights set on Europe as a first step. Schreiber says that the company is also looking to hire in customer support, claims, engineering and data science.
“Our biggest challenge is managing the growth,” said Schreiber. “How do you create an organization that has to constantly morph? The organization we were two years ago and the one we are now have very little in common. We went from one product in one state to now thinking about multiproduct across continents and five office locations. How do you do that without straining the system and continue to provide good, high quality service?”
This latest round of funding brings total financing for Lemonade to $480 million.
