As more Europeans welcome pets into their families, veterinary costs have gone up, but insurance options remain limited and reactive. Most insurers only help after a pet gets sick or injured, so owners face high bills and slow, manual claims.
Lassie, based in Stockholm, set out to change this. The company focuses on prevention, combining digital insurance, daily care tools, and AI to support pet health and keep owners involved. Through the app, customers can file claims quickly, track their pet’s health, and earn rewards for taking preventive steps.
This approach is catching on in Europe. Lassie now covers more than 250,000 pets in Sweden, Germany, and France, generates about $100 million in annual recurring revenue, and sees 25% daily user engagement, well above the industry average of 8-9%.
Lassie just raised $75 million in a Series C round, making it one of the biggest insurtech investments in Europe this year. Balderton Capital, Felix Capital, Inventure, Passion Capital, and Stena Sessan led the round. This brings the total funding to $120 million.
The funds will help Lassie expand into new European markets and invest further in AI claims and preventive health tools.
A platform that helps pet owners care for their animals every single day
Hedda Båverud Olsson, Sophie Wilkinson, and Johan Jönsson started Lassie in Stockholm to turn pet insurance into a system that encourages prevention, education, and real-time care. This approach has helped Lassie build trust with both investors and customers across different markets.
Olsson tells TFN, “I was inspired early on by my mum, who’s a veterinarian. I wanted to build a more preventive approach to pet insurance and create a broader pet health ecosystem. The vision was to ‘digitalise’ veterinary knowledge and make preventive care engaging through a fun, rewarding experience (including gamification).”
She adds, “My co-founder Sophie Wilkinson brought deep pet insurance expertise and recognised a clear gap in the market, and Johan Jönsson (full-stack engineer, previously at Spotify and Klarna) helped turn that vision into a product we could build and scale.”
Its AI claims engine processes over 60% of claims in Germany within six minutes. Pet owners upload a photo of the veterinary bill to get near-instant payouts for straightforward treatments.
Olsson elaborates, “We use AI across multiple parts of the business (pricing, customer success, and marketing), but the biggest ‘wow’ moment for customers is in claims. Around 60% of claims are fully automated, with payouts credited to customers’ accounts in as little as 6 minutes. AI assists in roughly 90% of claims overall.”
What sets Lassie apart is its focus on daily engagement. Users interact with the app every day through care guides, activity tracking, and rewards. This leads to two to three times more user activity than competitors and gives Lassie useful data to improve pricing and personalise services.
While traditional insurers like Agria or ManyPets just pay claims, Lassie is both an insurer and a digital wellness partner, blending education, prevention, and automation.
What about diversity, and what is it like being a woman in tech?
On diversity, Olsson notes, “70% of the team are women, and we have 10+ nationalities represented.”
On being a woman in tech, Olsson says, “My experience in tech and the startup ecosystem has been very positive. Building this company has been the most fun (and most meaningful) thing I’ve ever done. My advice is to stay a bit naïve in the best way: believe you can do it, ask for advice, surround yourself with great people, and then work consistently every day toward your goals.”
What’s ahead for Lassie?
With Series C funding, Lassie will expand into new European markets and enhance its use of AI in claims and preventive health. The company is also forming strategic partnerships that connect routine pet care to insurance outcomes, such as offering insurance through the Lidl Plus rewards program and integrating GPS tracking data from Tractive for activity-based policy discounts.
Lassie’s ambitions go beyond insurance. The company aims to become Europe’s leading pet care and insurance platform by building an ecosystem of connected services focused on healthy, data-driven pet ownership.p.
