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While Allstate’s CEO Tom Wilson named GEICO and Progressive when asked about the ability to grow auto insurance in 2025 as competitors do the same, no one on Allstate or Progressive’s earning calls addressed competition from Lemonade.

The insurtech recently announced the launch of Lemonade Car in the state of Colorado. At the same time, the company announced a significant milestone in its history—surpassing $1 billion in in force premiums across all lines. In force premium is a measure of annualized premiums that the insurtech tracks on a regular basis. During a fourth-quarter earnings conference call in late February, Lemonade executives guided toward $1.2 billion of in force premiums by year-end 2025, or a 28% jump over last year.

Related: Lemonade CEO Declares ‘Best Quarter Ever,’ Posts Narrowed Q4 Loss of $30M

Lemonade Car will play a key role in the company’s accelerating growth plan, which will explode the level of in force premiums to $10 billion within roughly the same time frame it took Lemonade to get to $1 billion, executives said an Investor Day event in November last year. They also noted that car insurance would represent 40%—$4 billion of the $10 billion total premiums—when they get there by 2035.

“We reached this [$1 billion] milestone 8.5 years after launch (<10 years from founding). For context: incumbents like Allstate, Farmers, GEICO, Liberty Mutual, Progressive, State Farm, and USAA each took 40-60 years to reach the equivalent figure (inflation adjusted),” wrote Lemonade Chief Executive Officer Daniel Schreiber in , celebrating Lemonade’s entrance to the “Tres Comma Club.”

Ambitiously, the post refers to the possibility that Lemonade Car will someday help drive the company toward “Cuatro Commas.”

For now, however, Lemonade’s launch of car insurance in Colorado brings Lemonade’s availability to roughly 40% of the U.S. car insurance market. “Coloradans spend about $7 billion on car insurance annually, with Lemonade’s existing Colorado customers spending hundreds of millions a year on car insurance, making the state a promising market for Lemonade Car,” the announcement said.

Still, hundreds of millions are a fraction of a U.S. market where Progressive and GEICO wrote $60.9 billion and $42.9 billion in net premiums across the nation last year. And while Lemonade executives used part of its Investor Day and fourth-quarter earnings calls to express their attraction 10X-ing the overall business, they also stressed the need for restraint on auto insurance as they move ahead.

“We’ve seen a tremendous amount of pent-up demand for our car product,” Schreiber said during a February earnings conference call, responding to an analyst who wanted to know more how Lemonade is responding to 700,000 customers the company previously said were on a waitlist for Lemonade Car insurance.

During last year’s Investor Day, Chief Business Officer Maya Prosor presented the figure, noting that the 700,000 customers had signed up for car insurance in places Lemonade was not yet offering the product. “These are customers on a waitlist for car insurance, not the latest drop of Air Jordans,” she said.

Providing an update during the February earnings call, Schreiber and President Shai Wininger said the company has been testing different ways accelerate growth by converting 2 million existing customers for other products, along with the waitlisted prospects. “The early results have been nothing short of stunning,” Schreiber said.

“But before we unleash rapid growth, we have to make sure that everything is solid,” he added. “We’ve seen car growth run away from companies that haven’t got all the foundations in place. We’re keen to not let that happen to us and therefore we are being restrained in that sense. The engines are revving, but we’re not putting it into first gear fully quite yet.”

Wininger sounded a bit more bullish when he responded to a set of questions about the go-to-market strategy for car insurance. “The essence of our growth strategy is that our best-in-class, first-party data will enable us to offer unbeatable prices for the customers we want. And it is absolutely true that we possess a structural tailwind in the form of our waitlist and well over 2 million active customers. We expect this will enable us to grow the car business with efficiency levels unavailable to our competitors,” he said.

He added that Lemonade expects to “begin ramping up” the process of adding states considerably throughout 2025 and 2026.

This is a portion of a larger story published in Carrier Management, a sister publication of Ãå±±ÂÖ¼é. Sign up and .

Topics Auto