Sequoia Capital just joined the growing trend of Venture Capital funds interested in taking a crunch at the insurance sector. The fund committed to a whopping $13m seed investment in Lemonade, a New York based startup brining peer-to-peer personal insurance to the US. The company remains very silent about it's products, but what's clear is that it is building an insurance carrier from scratch and feels they can make property and casualty insurance more delightful. As most insurance startups have been focused on the middle-man, removing the broker, it will be interesting to see how Lemonade measures up.
Since insurers use non-payment of claims as a profit center, the scales are weighted for the insurers to screw their customers out of contracts from the beginning. It’s this issue that Lemonade and its European counterparts are aiming to change. “We are building an insurance company fully vertically integrated from the ground up to rethink some of the building blocks of the industry,” says Schreiber (no relation).