Lemonade launches pet insurance

Lemonade today launched pet insurance, marking its entry into a new vertical of insurance for the first time since it launched its renters/home owners insurance in 2016.

Lemonade  CEO Daniel Schreiber told TechCrunch back in February that some 70% of Lemonade customers with a home owners or renters policy are also pet owners, and yet between 1 and 2% of pet owners in the United States have pet insurance. It’s a relatively straightforward Venn diagram.

Pet insurance from Lemonade will cost users $12/month, with a 10% discount available to existing Lemonade policy holders who choose to bundle their new pet insurance with home/renters insurance. The policy is only available to dog and cat owners — other pets are not covered.

The policy covers blood tests, urinalysis, x-rays, MRIs, labwork, CT scans and ultrasounds, as well as outpatient, specialty and emergency care procedures, along with hospitalization and surgery, according to the Lemonade website. The company also covers medication, including injections and prescription meds. Pet owners can also get an extended Accident and Illness Package that goes beyond the initial coverage of accidental road accidents and poisonings, and a variety illnesses.

Lemonade Pet Insurance comes with an optional wellness package, as well, which provides savings for routine stuff like an annual physical checkup, heartworm tests, fecal tests, annual parasite evaluation tests, blood work and up to three vaccines. The wellness package also gives pet owners access to medical advice chat and offers reminders and tips to keep their pet healthy.

“Health insurance for pets dates back to over 100 years ago,” Schreiber told TechCrunch in February. “It started with horses in the Netherlands, and the heir to that pet insurance is actually car insurance. Horses were a mode of transportation, and the insurance was meant to protect you if something happened to that mode of transportation. But pets are now members of the family.” According to Fortune, Americans spent upwards of $75 billion on their pets in 2019.

Insurance policies in general are also quite antiquated, with legal requirements to use language and clauses written decades ago. Lemonade has been trying to launch its Policy 2.0 — a simply worded policy that is open-sourced, allowing anyone to contribute or suggest changes to it — in the United States. Policy 2.0 is currently only available in Europe, but it marks a big change in the way insurance is handled, as one of the biggest issues in the industry is that policy holders simply don’t, and in some cases can’t, know what is and is not covered.

This launch comes at a time when Lemonade has just entered the public market, with a big pop in its first day of trading. Alongside its public offering, Lemonade has raised $480 million in institutional investment from firms like Sequoia, Allianz and others, with a team of 382 employees globally.

On the U.S. team, 35% of full-time employees are people of color; 61% are women. Globally, Lemonade is 49% women; a quarter of the R&D team are women, and the executive team is 33% women. The eight-member board includes one person of color and one woman.

Source: Techcrunch