InsurTech Lemonade reported a fourth-quarter 2024 net loss of about $30 million and a loss for the year of about $202.2 million.

Results were in comparison to a net loss of $42.4 million for fourth-quarter 2023 and a loss of nearly $237 million for the all of 2023. Growth spend in the last quarter of 2024 was $36 million versus $13 million a year ago during the same period.

Operating expense increased 38 percent to $124 million in Q4.

In a letter to shareholders, Lemonade said its Q4 2024 gross loss ratio was 63 — its best result ever. Gross profit increased 90 percent to $64 million as in force premium grew 26 percent year-over-year to $944 million. CEO Daniel Schreiber said it was the fifth straight quarter of top-line growth.

“Across the full gamut of our [key performance indicators], the fourth quarter was comfortably our best quarter ever,” Schreiber said during a conference call with analysts.

Lemonade said its accuracy in underwriting, supported by artificial intelligence, is proven by regulatory rate approvals that have the company entering 2025 “with rate adequacy across the majority of our portfolio.”

On the California wildfires, Lemonade said it expects an impact of about $45 million in gross losses in Q1 2025.

“If not for the diversity of our [California] book of business across home, renters, pet and car coverage, and initiatives to manage catastrophe exposure, specifically underwriting revisions, the financial impact of these wildfire events might have been five times greater,” Lemonade said in the letter to shareholders.

Looking ahead, President Shai Wininger told analysts that auto insurance is the “top strategic priority at the moment, and is expected to be a significant growth engine in the next phase” of the company’s growth. Lemonade’s car insurance product is available in just eight states, but Wininger said the company expects to “begin ramping that up considerably through 2025 and 2026.”

On self-driving cars, Wininger said the insurer is “keeping a close eye” on developments.

“It’s a disruption that has the potential to alter how risk is allocated in the car business,” Wininger added. “Dislocations like these create tremendous innovation opportunities for disruptors that don’t have large legacy business to protect.”