Lemonade Expands Into Pet Insurance

Lemonade is launching an insurance product that the company hopes will be the “cat’s meow” for pet owners: health insurance for cats and dogs.

The company said in a release that the product has been “designed exclusively for cats and dogs.”

“Creating the dream pet health insurance from scratch has been a journey in design, customer experience and empathy,” said Shai Wininger, chief operating officer and co-founder of Lemonade. He said that existing insurance options were “lacking, so we built a product for cats and dogs from the ground up. This means an insurance policy that’s short and easy to understand.”

Founded in 2016, Lemonade works to streamline the insurance process and “replace brokers and bureaucracy with bots and machine learning.” Prior to offering policies for pets, the company provided insurance policies to homeowners and renters, which the company claims it can provide within minutes.

“We’re excited to make pet health insurance so affordable and accessible,” said Wininger.

Lemonade said its pet health insurance will start at $12 per month. The company will offer a 10 percent discount to existing customers that have renters’ or homeowners’ policies if they add the pet insurance. Lemonade is billing this as “one of the only opportunities for consumers to bundle home insurance policies with pet health coverage.”

“The U.S. pet insurance market is valued at a couple of billion dollars, and with the increasing number of pet adoptions, coupled with rising veterinary costs, we believe this market can grow rapidly,” said Daniel Schreiber, Lemonade CEO and co-founder. He said that claims would be paid “in seconds.”

The policies offer a Preventative and Wellness package that includes the costs of routine wellness exams and vaccines. The Extended Accident and Illness package would help “to cover the costs of more advanced treatments and veterinary care,” per the release.

Earlier this month, the SoftBank-backed Lemonade had a highly successful initial public offering of stock. The company had priced its shares at $29, but opened at $50.06 a share on the New York Stock Exchange. The stock was trading at around $77 per share as of Wednesday (July 15).

Before going public, Lemonade raised $300 million in funding last year in a round led by SoftBank. The Japanese bank owns a 27.3 percent share in Lemonade. Other venture investors included Allianz SE and GV.