Lemonade, the publicly-traded insurtech firm that offers insurance for renters, homeowners, pet owners, and (very recently) car insurance, this week announced that it’s planning to acquire Metromile for $500M in stock.

Why should we care?
Metromile, which was founded in 2011, sought to simplify the car insurance process through a pay-per-mile offering. To access the product, car owners install a device that collects data about the user’s driving habits. The Lemonade-Metromile tie-up will allow Lemonade to expand its auto insurance footprint, especially since the company launched a car insurance product in Illinois just last week. Adding Metromile also broadens the reach of Lemonade’s data play, as the company taps data and artificial intelligence to deliver its home and pet insurance offerings. “[Metromile has] been down this road billions of times, and their proprietary data and machine learning algorithms can vault us over the most time and cost intensive parts of the journey. In a vast and competitive market like auto insurance, today’s deal is a huge unlock of value for our customers and shareholders,” Daniel Schreiber, Lemonade’s CEO and cofounder said in a statement. The transaction is expected to close during the second quarter of 2022.