The end of the year is a time for sitting back, taking stock, and reflecting on the past twelve months. While we doubtlessly made a few mistakes along the way—we’re only human, except when we’re bots—2021 brought plenty to celebrate.
Without further ado, let’s take a spin through some of the moments that made this year a unique one.
Drumroll, please…
We launched Lemonade Car!
It’s no easy feat to build an insurance product from scratch, and doing so often takes years. We got fast & furious and launched Lemonade Car in less than 12 months, bringing the experience to drivers in Illinois, with many more states to follow.
The goal is to bring greater equity and transparency to the industry. “Car insurance rates can be at best inaccurate, and at worst unfair,” Lemonade cofounder Shai Wininger wrote in a blog post announcing the launch. Lemonade Car aims to change that with a tech-forward approach that rewards safe and low-mileage drivers. Find out more, and join the waitlist to hear when Lemonade Car rolls into your state.
Want to hear something cool? Lemonade Car tracks your mileage, and we’ll be planting trees to help clean up after your personal carbon emissions.
We went to contract on our first M&A deal!
Say what? To translate the legalese: This means that, subject to shareholder and regulatory approvals, we’ll acquire Metromile, a simpatico brand in the car insurance sphere that has pioneered the use of pay per mile policies.
“Within minutes of meeting the Metromile team we knew we were among kindred spirits,” CEO Daniel Schreiber noted. “Here were digital natives, insurance nerds, and data scientists, all committed to harnessing technology to deliver faster, fairer, and more affordable insurance to consumers. People after our own heart.”
The Lemonade community gave over $2 million to charity, with your help!
There are plenty of things to love about Lemonade, including our Giveback program.
Our unique business model means that we take a fixed percentage of premiums off the top, and use the rest of the money to pay claims; funds that don’t go toward claims are donated to amazing nonprofits that our customers tell us matter to them.
In 2021, that meant the Lemonade community was able to donate $2,303,381 to nonprofits like the ACLU and American Red Cross. If you want a full breakdown of where the money went, go ahead and take a deep dive into the 2021 Giveback.
We welcomed a new Chief Claims Officer!
If you’re a Lemonade customer, you may have already “met” our original Chief Claims Officer, Jim Hageman—his digital avatar, AI Jim, is your first point of contact when filing a claim. Late in 2021, Jim decided to pass the proverbial baton to industry veteran Sean Burgess, who joins Lemonade after a whopping 27 years at legacy insurer USAA.
Read Sean’s journey-to-Lemonade story, and find out why both Daniel Schreiber and Sean’s own daughter tried to convince him not to take the job.
We commissioned 76 artists to create nearly 90 unique artworks for our Instagram account
“Insurance company” and “art” don’t often appear in the same sentence together, but we like to keep things weird at Lemonade. Our #ConnectedByLemonade initiative on Instagram has brought wild, pink-inflected artwork and animations to the masses.
With artists hailing from around the world—including Egypt, New Zealand, and Albania—this was truly an international project, and a way to connect creative voices during a year when most everyone was stuck close to home.
We recommitted to actually having an impact on the environment!
You may remember that we pledged to divest from fossil fuels back in 2017—the first U.S. insurer to do so—and this year we made another promise. Lemonade signed on to Net Zero 2030, joining a coalition of companies that have pledged to achieve net zero emissions by 2030. One way we’ll help to accomplish that is via Lemonade Car’s inventive tree-planting initiative.
We basically doubled the size of our team!
Our Talent team has been very busy finding incredible people who want to help disrupt insurance. In the month of September alone we welcomed 137 new employees around the world!
Curious why people love our work culture? Keep an eye on our Makers page for future openings in New York, Tel Aviv, Amsterdam, Arizona, and beyond.
We reimagined the way our app looks & feels!
Our original app provided a clean, intuitive user experience for the products we started with—namely, renters and homeowners insurance.
But now the Lemonade family also includes term life, pet, and car insurance… so we redesigned our app in order to give each product room to shine. This allows customers to easily toggle between various insurances, doing everything from filing claims to adjusting coverage limits.
It’s yet another reason to get all the things you care about covered with Lemonade.
We now have at least one product available in each state!
Now, no matter where you live in the U.S., you can get covered with one of Lemonade’s products. In some states—like Illinois—you can become a true Lemonade MVP and sign up for four: homeowners, pet, term life, and car insurance.
We won some acclaim, and a few awards!
Hey, we don’t like to pat ourselves on the back, but if you’re curious about what other people think about us…
- Money.com recognized Lemonade Homeowners as the “Best Online Insurance”
- Forbes listed Lemonade Renters as one of the “Best Renters Insurance Companies”
- Fast Company recognized the Lemonade Giveback program in its list of “World Changing Ideas” for 2021
- J.D. Power ranked Lemonade Renters highest in their “2021 Homeowners Insurance Study”
- Better Homes & Gardens ranked Lemonade Pet as “Best Overall” among pet insurance companies
- Inc. Magazine dubbed Lemonade one of the “Best-Led Companies” and a “Best Workplace” in America
What can we say? We’re insurance nerds.
And on a less serious note…
- We published a book about a dog!
- We, um, curated our first-ever music festival on April 1?
- We used telepathy to understand what your pets are thinking, and also guessed their names
- We embarked on a relationship with Bud Light, but things quickly fell apart.