Innovative Insurance Platform Lula Raises $35.5M in Series B Funding

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Today’s Highlights:

• 💸Innovative Insurance Platform Lula Raises $35.5M in Series B Funding🚚

• 🛒Save99🪙

Lula's Journey from Car Rentals to Disruptive Insurance Innovation

Insurance is a customary and essential aspect of most people’s lives. Whether in the form of life or health insurance, auto insurance, or property insurance, insurance plans are beneficial to anyone looking to protect their assets or themselves and their families from financial risk and losses.

It is without question that the journey of acquiring traditional insurance can get complicated, though. Anyone acquiring insurance would usually have to sign up for policies, submit claims, and wait for reimbursements, and this lengthy process we have to go through can often be discouraging and exhausting.

In our modern day and age, more companies are realizing this, and some have attempted to create the voyage that is getting insurance simpler. One of the companies building a future of seamless protection for consumers is Miami-based startup Lula, founded in the middle of the pandemic by twin brothers Michael and Matthew Vega-Sanz.

Cars, An Origin Story

Coming up with Lula and developing it into the insurance infrastructure platform it is now wasn’t an easy feat. The Vega-Sanz brothers’ journey started with a different business that they developed in college, which eventually led to Lula.

In 2018, the brothers built an app that allowed college students to rent cars from other people on campus. Being the first app to allow 18-year-olds to rent cars without restrictions, we can imagine that demand for their business would rise quickly. By September of the same year, the brothers launched the app beyond Babson College, the college they attended, and it became one of the top apps on Apple’s app store. In only 12 months following the launch, over 500 college campuses in the US utilized the app and had cars available.

This rise in demand made the brothers think of insurance coverage. After pitching to 47 insurance companies that rejected them, the brothers ended up creating their own underwriting tools and began partnering with car rental providers not long after.

In early 2020, rental companies started putting a significant portion of their business through Lula, and one of them asked whether they could start using the brothers’ insurance infrastructure software in the rest of their business. This request brought out the realization that the pot of gold the brothers have been searching for wasn’t the car-sharing app but instead, the protective software they now say to be “Stripe for insurance.”

If you’re unaware of Stripe, it is a suite of APIs* that power online payment processing, a platform that could fully integrate into businesses to help manage payments and payouts. The revolutionary role Stripe plays in the financial industry is what Lula aims to be in insurance. How?

*APIs: Application Programming Interface, a set of functions and procedures that allow for the creation of applications.

Auto Industry

Following a massive surge in its customer base this year, from 99 business integrations in February 2022 to nearly 4,000 as of July, Lula ran a Series B funding round resulting in $35.5 million raised, with the support of NextView Ventures and Khosla Ventures as co-leaders along with Founders Fund, Financial Technology Partners founder, managing partner Steve McLaughlin, co-chair of Bain Capital Steve Pagliuca, and Nextera Energy.

While Lula’s goal prior to the surge was to simply build an insurance API that could eliminate the need for companies to build their own insurance infrastructure, the company’s goal has now broadened and evolved.

The brothers have expressed that they wish to help companies reduce insurance premiums and practically any insurance–related expenses. To achieve this, Lula offers a range of insurance tools which includes risk management, claims management, policy management, and access to insurance coverage for car rentals and trucking and logistic companies, along with car-sharing platforms. At the moment, Lula has partnered with Kyte, Turo, and State National.

Still focusing mainly on the auto industry, Lula launched a product last May specifically for the trucking industry. While truckers are traditionally required to pay for 365 days a year for insurance coverage, resulting in wasteful expenses considering trucks are usually only used for a fraction of a year, Lula offers a way for trucking companies to only pay for coverage when their trucks are actually on the road.

Lula’s API also provides tools for companies to vet drivers, do driver history checks, organize policies, and manage claims to ensure the utmost safety and protection.

Embedded Future, Frugal Past

Prior to the company’s series B funding, the brothers prioritized capital efficiency and feel as though this is what has brought Lula to success. Although worried that being frugal while other companies were offering sky-high salaries would discourage quality employees from joining Lula, it proved to be quite the opposite.

According to the Vega-Sanz brothers, Lula employees, including senior leadership members, appreciated being part of a business with a cost-conscious mentality. This way, they didn’t have them worry about hitting the fan after a few months due to lavish spending that could lead to company-wide layoffs.

Following the funding, Lula plans to expand its service by working with industries outside of the “wheels” scope, one of them being the logistics industry. The company will also move into embedded insurance in the near future.

Favorite Product of the Day

Save99

Have you ever been fooled into thinking that the items you want to buy are cheaper than you thought? You’re shopping online, scrolling through your favorite clothing or game stores, and see the thing you’ve wanted for weeks on sale, and it says $25.67$12.99. You’re thinking $12 dollars??!! Score! You add to the cart and make your purchase, still thinking it’s $12 dollars when in reality, it’s closer to $13. The numbers might not matter much to some, but it’s the principal of it all, no?

This is a pricing strategy businesses make, often referred to as the “charm pricing”’ technique. Corporations are taking advantage of the fact that we usually read from left to right, and our brains tend to remember the first characters we see, so unrounded prices would make us think that an item has a lower price. Well, you can stop letting corporations fool you by using Save99, a Google Chrome extension that rounds prices to whole numbers!

The extension automatically rounds prices to the nearest whole number visible on an online store, displaying a listed $12.99 as $13. With this tool, you can be more aware of a product’s actual value and make more rational shopping decisions. During busy times, you also wouldn’t need to go through the hassle of calculating price amounts or dealing with decimal places thanks to the clear and straightforward figures already provided for you!

The extension supports desktop versions of Amazon in the USA, UK, and Germany, eBay in the USA, and Walmart.

Add the extension to your Chrome browser here! 

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