Real Estate

SoftBank-backed US home insurance start-up Lemonade looks to Europe for its first expansion abroad


Daniel Schreiber, co-founder and chief executive of Lemonade, speaks onstage during TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2017.

Noam Galai | Getty Images for TechCrunch

Daniel Schreiber, co-founder and chief executive of Lemonade, speaks onstage during TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2017.

Lemonade, a U.S. home and renters insurance start-up, is making Europe its first global expansion target.

The New York-based firm uses artificial intelligence (AI) and chatbots to tailor insurance products for homeowners and tenants on its platform.

In an announcement Thursday, the company said the move abroad will come “soon,” but did not specify what date that would take place or which country it was stretching its reach into first.

“Nominally, the U.S. is a single country, but in terms of its regulatory structure its actually 50 different countries, every state is independent,” Daniel Schreiber, chief executive and co-founder of Lemonade, told CNBC in an interview Thursday.

“Europe doesn’t work that way. We’ll see what happens with the U.K. and Brexit, but certainly other members of the European bloc… you passport freely throughout Europe so you don’t need to set your sights on a particular country.”

Lemonade, launched in September 2016 by entrepreneurs Schreiber and Fiverr co-founder Shai Wininger, touts its digital offering as a way of speeding up the process of applying for coverage, cutting out the paperwork and human agents often involved in the process.

Despite being a for-profit company, it takes a flat fee from insurance applicants and puts any leftover cash into charities. It charges renters a monthly subscription rate of $5 and homeowners a monthly rate of $25.



READ SOURCE

Leave a Reply

This website uses cookies. By continuing to use this site, you accept our use of cookies.