Hedvig raises $45 million
Hedvig, the Swedish version of Lemonade, has raised $45 million in Series B funding. The round was led by Anthemis with participation from existing investors including Cherry Ventures, Obvious Ventures, CommerzVentures, along with Swedish Novax, Nineyards Equity, Jonas Kamprad and Mathias Kamprad.
Launched in 2018, Hedvig announced its plans last year to become a regulated insurance company in Europe. The startup is currently live in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, and has around 70k customers.
Similar to Lemonade, Hedvig takes a fixed amount and promises to donate what’s left over to charity. Insurance products being offered include renters, homeowners, and a student plan that provides a variety of coverages including liability, legal protection, travel, and more.
Since Hedvig copied many Lemonade elements including claim handling time and the fixed fee aspect (it even went from charging 20% to 25% similar to Lemonade), let’s look at how the companies compare based on one metric Lemonade loves – policies per employee. However, since we don’t have the number of policies we’ll have to focus on number of customers. In Q2 2021, Lemonade had around 1.2 million customers and 662 employees according to LinkedIn. Hedvig today has 70k customers and 120 employees. A simple calculation reveals that for every Lemonade employee there are 1,813 customers and for every Hedvig employee there are 583 customers.
“We have created an insurance experience based on the younger generation’s on-demand expectations. Integrated in our home insurance is something we call “clumsiness” insurance. We’ve got your back, even if the damage was caused by your own blundering. And when you need us, you only need to submit a simple voice message to receive assistance within minutes. We love to spoil our members and to see how word is spreading. Anthemis’ deep understanding and experience of both financial technology and insurance make them the perfect ally as we scale this proposition across Europe.” – Lucas Carlsén, CEO and co-founder of Hedvig.
