Insurance Startup Lemonade Gets Sweeter With $300M Infusion

Lemonade, which operates an AI-driven insurance platform, has raised $300 million in a Series D round led by SoftBank Group that reportedly values the company at more than $2 billion.

Subscribe to the Crunchbase Daily

New York-based Lemonade has now raised a total of $480 million during its lifetime. Its last raise was a $120 million Series C in late 2017 that valued the company at $620 million. SoftBank led that round as well.

This latest financing also included participation from Germany’s Allianz, General Catalyst, GV (formerly known as Google Ventures), Israel-based OurCrowd, and Thrive Capital. Lemonade said it plans to use the new capital to accelerate its U.S. and European expansion, as well as to explore new product lines. The company first announced plans to move into Europe – its first major market outside the U.S. – last November.

Lemonade is licensed as a property and casualty insurance carrier and began offering homeowners and renters’ insurance in New York in late 2016. That offering is now available for most of the U.S. population. The company says it powers its offerings with artificial intelligence and “behavioral economics.” Lemonade claims it’s built a system that “collects 100x more data than traditional carriers,” giving it the ability to generate predictive data that can help improve underwriting and pricing. It operates contrary to traditional insurance models, charging a fixed percentage as a flat fee.

Lemonade also has a social good component. As a certified B-Corp, the company annually donates a portion of unclaimed premium dollars to nonprofits. But it also believes in growth. Daniel Schreiber, Lemonade CEO and co-founder, told me via email this morning that his company’s revenue climbed 466 percent to $57.2 million in 2018. The number of homes it insures, meanwhile, grew to 425,000 last year (covering just shy of $50 billion in total insured value) compared to just more than 100,000 at the end of 2017.  And, Lemonade upped the number of states it serves to 21 last year compared to eight in 2017. It’s also seen its headcount climb – to 165 employees today, up from around 50 a year ago. For more details on its growth metrics, check here.

Note: We updated this story post-publication with comments from the company.

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias