Swedish pet insurance startup Lassie has raised a $75m Series C equity round from investors including Balderton, Felix Capital, Inventure, Passion Capital and Stena Sessan.
The company, which launched in Sweden in 2020, has since expanded to France and Germany, which has overtaken Sweden as its largest market, cofounder and CEO Hedda Båverud Olsson tells Sifted.
Båverud Olsson says the round allows the company to hit profitability and continue expanding across Europe. “It's a very luxurious position, where you don’t have to make bad decisions because you're out of cash,” she says.
The insurtech sector has taken a big hit in the years following the boom days in 2021 and 2022. In late 2023, French insurtech Luko was forced to sell its business to Allianz Direct as part of a restructuring process. The same year, Swedish pet and home insurer Hedvig pulled out of Denmark and Norway to focus on its home market.
The situation has been different for Lassie, according to Båverud Olsson. The company, which now insures 250k pets across its markets and has over $100m in annual recurring revenue, has grown slowly but steadily.
“Many have focused on growth at all costs,” she says. “But when the recession hit, some of those insurers lost their insurance provider or had to double prices for customers.
“To our advantage, we launched with an insurance expert in our team, so we’ve always had it under control and never had to roll back,” she says. “In the beginning, we perhaps grew a bit more slowly, but we built our fundamentals on a profitable insurance portfolio.”
Lassie added AI features to its product early on, Båverud Olsson says, which gave it the ability to pay customers for their insurance claims instantly. In 60% of cases, it takes six minutes or less from a photo of a receipt being uploaded at the veterinary clinic, Båverud Olsson says.
By using customer interaction features, such as offering short courses on dog or cat health, training and nutrition and letting customers convert bonus points into insurance discounts, the company has built a very active customer base. Båverud Olsson says 25% of its monthly active users use the product every day.
“People find it so fun,” she says. “But I think it's hard to say that you can win the game by just having one USP.
“We've always set a goal that we should be 10 times better than a competitor; it's not enough to just have a nice app.”
